So, you’re trans. Don’t you think the obvious first question is: When did you know you were a boy? Did you always feel “born in the wrong body”? And, while we’re at it, was your family cool with your transition? And how wild is it to know what it’s like to be BOTH genders?

Let me just read you some of the back-jacket copy your publisher sent over:

“From an award-winning writer whose work bristles with “hard-won strength, insight, agility, and love” (Maggie Nelson), an exquisite and troubling narrative of masculinity, violence, and society.

In this groundbreaking new book, the author, a trans man, trains to fight in a charity match at Madison Square Garden while struggling to untangle the vexed relationship between masculinity and violence. Through his experience boxing—learning to get hit, and to hit back; wrestling with the camaraderie of the gym; confronting the betrayals and strength of his own body—McBee examines the weight of male violence, the pervasiveness of gender stereotypes, and the limitations of conventional masculinity. A wide-ranging exploration of gender in our society, Amateur is ultimately a story of hope, as McBee traces a new way forward, a new kind of masculinity, inside the ring and outside of it.”

Yeah. I see your point. Honestly, when I was reading the book, I saw a lot of myself in it. I just haven’t talked to a real-life trans person before, and I’m pretty anxious about getting it wrong. Plus, my curiosity got the better of me, and I forgot that you were both a person and a writer. I’m sorry.

Thanks so much for acknowledging that. I wish interviewers would do that more often. My goal with Amateur, and frankly everything I write, is to undermine narratives that frame bodies in terms of difference with the violent practice of what I call “other-ing.” I think differences are useful to explore, but only through the lens of connection. You and I have way more in common than we don’t, and that’s always my starting point. Amateur is about fighting, by which I mean questioning, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Where do they come from? Who writes them? To me, freedom is captaining my own narrative. In a culture that so often reduces so many of us to background actors, sensational headlines, and metaphors, I think it’s crucial to take control of our stories–for everyone’s sake. Stories are the way all humans make meaning out of life. Erasing the stories of people that don’t look or act exactly like us is erasing part of ourselves.

Your book is about masculinity specifically. Was it scary to question masculinity?

Yes. Most men are afraid to ever ask any questions about what we’ve been socialized to think “being a man” means. For many men, to question masculinity–and this is the twisted genius of patriarchy–is to suggest that you are not a man. It was pretty stunning for me, actually, to really look at the language around manhood closely, especially phrases I’d internalized like “real man.” I wrote this book because, as I got further along in my transition, some of the expectations I faced–and some of the behaviors I found myself performing on auto-pilot–distressed me. I realized that I’d been internalizing toxic masculinity despite my best defenses, and I figured that if I–a man who transitioned in his 30s, well into adulthood and with the presence of mind and moral compass to know better–was performing some of the very same toxic behaviors I once derided (like interrupting women, for example, or struggling to show sadness), I could have both compassion and real talk for cis men who’d experienced social conditioning at a much younger age.

So you’re saying testosterone made you act like a jerk?

No, definitely not. The book does ask that question, because I asked every single question I could think of, even the ones where I was afraid to know the answer. But, definitively, I can say that Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford researcher, confirmed that testosterone has nothing to do with aggression. In fact, the hormone actually seems to encourage status-seeking. The trouble is, Sapolsky said, aggression IS what gains status in most cultures. But they’ve run economic games where men are rewarded for cooperation, and the winners of those games were consistently the men who had the highest testosterone levels. It’s the stories we tell about biology that are more powerful than our biology itself. In fact, in those studies, men who were told that they had been given a boost of testosterone acted way more aggressively after hearing that information. The truth was, they had been given a placebo. The idea that testosterone makes us aggressive is what makes us aggressive.

So why did you fight a guy in Madison Square Garden?

Because the question that launched the book was: Why do men fight? One summer in New York, right before the election of Donald Trump, a spate of guys attempted to street fight me–three in a row. The last guy, I almost came to actual blows with. It felt like a turning point for me. I was four years into my transition, and acting in ways that I didn’t understand. I felt I was being socialized so quickly, I barely had time to think about what the implications of that socialization were.

Carl Jung suggests that the rejected parts of ourselves–both individually and culturally–form a “shadow” self that ultimately acts out if it’s not integrated into our psyches. I walked away from that fight, but I didn’t think it was enough to just say, as I often see men do, “I’m not that kind of guy” and just move on with my life. I WAS that kind of guy, at least a little. I wanted to really shine a light on why–how did I get here? I’d been reporting on the masculinity crisis for years, and I could see echoes of my personal struggle to make sense of the effect of my new body on the world in the crisis of men being described in the media. I didn’t want to become an angry man.

After I sold the book, Donald Trump was elected president. It felt to me that this story of facing my shadow so as not to become it was a story that was about more than my body, but about men in general. I think we all have a moral responsibility to root out the parts of our socialization that offend our conscience and uphold values that our abhorrent to ourselves and our communities. I feel the same way about my whiteness. So the book is about facing those questions with complete openness. The fact that I’m trans is a lens and a point of view. The book is about moving through the world as a white man–exposing privilege, questioning what makes me complacent in that privilege, and also highlighting the costs of masculinity for men.

What are those costs?

For me, the masculinity crisis is a spiritual, health, and environmental crisis. It’s evident in the rising suicide rates of men, and the fact that men are less likely to work to save the planet, and that men are conditioned out of what the NYU psychologist Niobe Way calls “everything that makes us human”–empathy, intimacy, connection. That old story trope of the man (usually) who trades love and family and meaning for a kingdom or power: That’s actually what men have done, and continue to do. It’s harmful to everyone around us, and our planet, and it’s also harmful to ourselves. I love being a man. I’ve traded so much to live an authentic life. I love my body. But I wasn’t willing to make that trade. And I think toxic masculinity will never go away until men stop seeing themselves in terms of “good guys” and “bad guys” and begin to see the systemic ways conditioning effects them, take responsibility for it, and fight to change it.

The title of your new collection is Feminists Are Passing from Our Lives. Where does it come from and is this a book about feminists?

I used the title of one of my favorite poems in the manuscript, which is a parody of Philip Levine’s poem, “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives” which was published in the 1960’s. Levine’s speaker is a pig being taken to market to be sold for meat. The pig can sense his fate and speaks with a dignity we wouldn’t expect from any being under those circumstances.

With what’s been happening in the lives of American women, whose health care rights are under threat, who are still not paid equally for our work, and who are being targeted by extremist groups in the “manosphere,” I sometimes feel like that pig, properly fattened on title 9, on access to safe healthcare and a good education, now being guided into a future that looks a lot like the past. It’s a cautionary. It’s also an accounting of growing old.

What’s going on in your cover?

The cover is a painting made by my friend Tina Gibbard, who I met in 2010 during a ten day residency on a 100-acre island off the coast of northern Maine. I don’t think the residency’s still operating. But those ten days were among the strangest of my life. There were ten of us, if I remember correctly, including the writers Brian Bouldrey, Ron Tanner, Gus Rose, Andy Duncan, and D. Foy. Experiences included a foray to a nearby island which a magnificent (and fully furnished) long-deserted house, a mystery theft of cash from one of the artists which resulted in forcible removal of another artist, three backbreaking hours collecting mussels with Ron Tanner only to be told after lugging buckets to the kitchen that they were inedible due to red tide, watching a meteor shower in black-black sky, being woken every morning by ripe language by a lobsterman convinced that his traps were being poached by another lobsterman, and spending hours alone on a remote beach collecting sea glass.

I wrote one poem in those ten days. It was never published. But I met Tina and fell in love with her work, which has a wonderful wryness. The Swedish horses in her painting are facing each other in the usual stolid Swedish horse way, but their shadows are having a very different and far livelier discussion. It was the perfect visual representation of the poems in this book, which point to the layer of truth beneath the accepted truth.

Any Easter eggs?

Oh yes. Starting with the cover image, which didn’t fully register with numerous loved ones, including my husband. So I did what poets can do. I thought of two people I admire who have Swedish-sounding names (Elsa Rush and Sven Birkerts) and made up a second epigraph for the collection. Hopefully it helps explain the cover image a little more.

I’ve put bits and pieces of images into many of the poems that will be known only to a few readers. “Astonishment” for instance, is written to a poet friend who prefers her name not to be mentioned, but who I wanted to honor with a poem. “Bitterness in the Mouth” and “Mumblety Peg” were kindled by a man in the literary community who was a grifter. He wreaked havoc in the lives of people and institutions I hold dear and it infuriated me to see person after person turn their headto it for years, not wanting to get involved. If we care for each other, then we must speak up when harm is being done.

These kinds of poems can be tricky in terms of finding the right balance between allegiance to what happened and the likelihood that the poem will move readers who know nothing of the precipitating event. Now “Mumblety Peg” is often read as applying to Trump, but he wasn’t yet on the national political stage when the poem was written.

Why do you write so much about mental illness?

I wanted to be a clinical psychologist and to that end I got a B.A. and an M.A. in psychology. I left my doctoral studies at NYU when I became pregnant and when I was ready to resume, the world had shifted. Managed care had been installed. My dreams of being a psychoanalyst whose treatment was covered by insurance were slim. And then the most terrible blessing of my life happened: I went into a depression so severe that I was hospitalized in a psychiatric facility on and off for a year. I found myself on the other side of the doctor-patient dyad. My sense of empathy for my fellow patients bloomed. As a psychiatric patient, I became an outsider, not to be trusted, considered too crazy to pick up on snide remarks and outright cruelty by some staff. This continued after I was released back into my home and life. People I’d grown up with, socialized with, avoided me. My husband at the time told me he no longer loved or trusted me. Because my depression was interwoven with having been sexually violated as a child by a family member, some members of my family chose ridicule and ostracism over believing me. It remains this way now 26 years later.

But I found my people in that psychiatric hospital. And I find more of us everywhere: online, as neighbors, in my classes, trying to live productively and with dignity in a world that tends to shame us. I think of my poems on mental illness as a kind of whale song, heard by many but best understood by my pod.

What is the role of social media in your life? Be honest.

I’ve got a Twitter account, but it’s mostly read-only. So much of what comes out of that fire hose is impulsive and of low nutrient content. That said, Roxane Gay is a goddess for all eternity. Facebook has been a better fit for me. I’ve made many friends, gotten and given encouragement and comfort from people I’d never ordinarily come into contact with. And more than one poem in this book came out of a slapdash status that I’d posted, to which another poet said “That’s the start of a poem.” The tanka “Some Comfort in a Smaller Field of Vision” came about this way and was published in the Yale Review. I love the serendipitous quality of poetry.

How does an older white woman from Connecticut approach issues of social justice?

The news about race relations in the last four or five years, particularly how African Americans are regarded with suspicion and treated viciously by law enforcement, woke me up to a part of life in America I’d ignored. This is one area that social media has been very helpful to me. I was taken to task, and rightly so, quickly and directly by writers of color who challenged my language, tone, and my belief that my behavior, though unintentional, wasn’t hurtful.

When writing about race, gender, mental illness, and the way human beings prey upon each other, I write slant but unsparingly. I want my audience, which is mostly white and older, to hear someone who looks and lives like they do wrestling with these issues. I want to bring them in and get them talking and reconsidering. I want to model for them the fact that this kind of introspection is painful but necessary, no matter how old we are.

Do you have any top secret weapons that you deploy when writing?

Oh yes. I can think of three immediately: online dictionaries, reading other poets’ work, and slipping into the kitchen to bake. Each of these things activates a kind of mental peripherality, in which I’m no longer thinking directly about the trouble I’m having on the page. I use thesaurus.com and online etymological dictionaries like other people take walks, I suspect. I follow my nose from link to link with no particular goal. Sounds, images, and whole webs of ideas pop up. It’s a kind of travel that’s both relaxing and broadening. Reading other people’s work allows me to get out of my own mind and enter another’s obsessions. And baking is a great deal like poetry in that it takes decades to learn to do well and involves concentration and precision. Thankfully baking, unlike poetry, provides an immediate tangible payoff. I can eat that brownie.

Your first two books seemed to be all about food. This one isn’t. What gives?

As a cook, food is rich with metaphor for me, so it was a natural launch pad into writing poems, especially when I was a beginning poet. My first successful poem was about baking soda bread. And I had (and still have) an obsession with butter. I was commissioned by Cabot Creamery about eleven years ago to write a poem that appeared on their butter package. Because Cabot is a collaborative, I was operating on orders from the farmers to include a cow, a field, and a farmer. I was pretty happy with the poem—and thrilled with the huge audience it got—until I read it one night at a big reading in Manhattan, when I realized I’d essentially re-written Goodnight Moon starring butter.

I began to hear people referring to me as a food poet, which annoyed me, so I changed direction. Still, food sneaks its way into poems in strange and hilarious ways. In “The Mouth of the Mind” a baby rabbit is “mild and untouchable as a baked potato.” In another I borrowed the phrase “you can’t lift a cheesecake with an iron hook” from my friend Norman Rush’s novel Subtle Bodies.

suffering their husbands
who poured from the commuter train
gin-flushed and slurring. You who
I raised on Our Bodies, Our Selves

believe that feminism’s as passé
as the sanitary napkin and the typewriter.
You roll your eyes and smirk
at my pleas not to become housewives.

I’ve seen that beast
hook its teeth on the cleverest PhD
and take her down for decades.That won’t happen to us,

you say, we’ve come too far.We’re protected under the law a majority, a force.
No. Not that big.

]]>http://thenervousbreakdown.com/lmcgrath/2018/08/feminists-are-passing-from-our-lives/feed/0Get a Job: Episode Onehttp://thenervousbreakdown.com/jgrantham/2018/08/get-a-job/
http://thenervousbreakdown.com/jgrantham/2018/08/get-a-job/#commentsFri, 10 Aug 2018 16:10:20 +0000http://thenervousbreakdown.com/?p=129722Here’s the start of the story and it’s a good story and this one is true.

Ashleigh Bryant Phillips is from North Carolina and we met on the internet because she went on a book tour with my friend Bud Smith and Bud told her some stories about me and then Bud told me some stories about her.

We exchanged numbers and texted and talked on the phone and I told her to listen to the song ‘House Cat’ by Mark Kozelek and she sent me a video of a hooting owl.

And then she sent me a postcard.

The photo on the postcard was of an Australian soldier standing next to a camel in the year 1917 and the Australian man was putting his wrist into the camels mouth to show how docile the camel was.

On the backside of the postcard was a message written in black ink from a ballpoint pen.

This is what the message said:

Dear Joey,

After all that house cat and owl talk the other night I fell asleep and in my dream you were there in my house in the country waking me up, you were jumping on my bed. Then you started making out with your hand so I made out with my hand and then we went downstairs for coffee. I started making Café Bustelo when a big fat landlady with a long hot pink satin robe appeared. She scared me and I spilled the coffee on the floor. You were standing at the storm door talking to the neighbor dogs through the glass. “It’s OKAY,” the landlady said, her robe was lined with feathers. “Let’s go out on the street for coffee,” you said. So we left the mess on the floor and walking out we were suddenly in the hallway of an old apartment in NYC. We passed by an apartment door that had a missing dog sign—a pug. But when we read the sign it said “My name is Mr. Churchill and I’m sorry I bark so much, I’m old now and blind and get frightened easily—sorry for all the noise.” We agreed it was a heartfelt moment and went out on the street.

Nice to meet you,

Ashleigh

I read the postcard and I came up with an idea.

This is what my idea was:

I am going to quit my job in San Francisco and move to North Carolina.

I am going to live in a house with Ashleigh.

Ashleigh says, “My family is probably wondering why my boyfriends never have cars.”

We are on a porch swing on her porch and we just shared a cigarette because sometimes we like to share a cigarette even though we both don’t like to smoke.

I’ve been here for a month.

And I say, “Have none of your boyfriends had cars?”

And she says, “Well, my first one didn’t.”

And I remember that I met her second boyfriend.

He was wearing a tight white undershirt tucked into some jeans and his hair was parted and slicked back with pomade.

He had big lips and he talked with his hands and he bought me a beer.

I know he had a truck.

I think he tried to sell it to me.

It was a stick shift, though.

And I can’t drive a stick shift.

I can’t do a lot of things.

I have my arm around Ashleigh and I’m looking at her and then I look out at the street where you can see the bugs under the lights and I say, “I never needed a car growing up and then I moved to cities where it would have been a pain in the ass to have a car.”

And I know I’m just defending myself because I do feel a bit emasculated.

But that’s okay.

It’s just that I moved here, to Woodland, North Carolina—a town with a population of about 800—and I don’t have a car and I don’t have a job.

I quit my job as a bookseller at City Lights and I moved out here to live in this house with Ashleigh and I knew it wouldn’t be easy getting a job around here, but when I was in San Francisco I didn’t worry about that because I was in San Francisco.

I’m here in Woodland now.

This is where I live.

Ashleigh’s mom, who I call “Mama”, said I could probably get a job at the prison if I sent in an application.

She said they’d probably hire me the next day.

“What kind of job would it be?” I asked her.

“A prison guard,” she said.

She didn’t say it like she was joking.

She said it like it was a job like any other job and like it was a job she could see me doing.

The first thing I thought of when Mama said “prison guard” was an image of a prisoner with his arm around my neck and a shiv in his hand.

I don’t think I would be a good prison guard.

“He’d have to cut all his hair off,” Ashleigh said.

“No he wouldn’t,” Mama said.

But I think I would.

But maybe it would be good.

Maybe I could be a good prison guard.

The best prison guard.

Everybody’s favorite prison guard.

But I think that what would happen is I would die in a prison riot.

We get up off of the porch swing and we go back inside and we sit down on the couch and we fall asleep on the couch and then we wake up and it’s not even midnight so we go upstairs and get in Ashleigh’s bed and we go to sleep and her alarm wakes us up at 7:10 in the morning.

She has a job and she needs to get up and get out of bed in the morning.

She’s a writer but she works at an insurance firm and it’s a good boring job.

Monday through Friday, 8:30-5:00.

She goes downstairs and gets ready for work and makes us coffee and I get up and throw some shorts on and put on my shoes without putting on any socks.

I’m going to drive her to work because it’s her car and if she takes it then I’ll be stuck in the house all day which is what I’ll be anyway because I don’t really have any idea where to go during the day unless I’m with Ashleigh.

It’s a ten minute drive to the insurance firm and I pull up in front of her office building at the same time as the other employees and they see me dropping off Ashleigh and they’re probably wondering who the hell this guy is with his mustache and his big glasses and his long hair and why the hell is he dropping off Ashleigh and why the hell doesn’t he have his own car and his own job and his own house?

I’m not trying to say I look special.

Walk down a street in Brooklyn and you’ll see ten assholes who look just like me.

Maybe I’m overthinking it.

But I don’t look like I’m from around here and I don’t sound like I’m from around here but it doesn’t matter because I live here now.

I watch her disappear into the building and then I drive back to the house and I open up my laptop and look at the jobs I’ve applied to so far.

I’ve applied to be a public safety officer at a small university in the neighboring county.

I don’t think I would be a good public safety officer, but I think that the college students would like me.

I wouldn’t keep them safe, but they might like me and they definitely wouldn’t put their arms around my neck or point shivs at me.

I even went in there and met a man named Robert and shook his hand and told him it was nice to meet him and could he please hire me?

But I still haven’t heard from them.

I would be an incredible cashier.

But they won’t call me.

Or maybe they already did.

The problem is my cellphone doesn’t get service in Woodland.

It doesn’t get service in most of the towns around here.

So I’ve started calling all of these places using Ashleigh’s phone and telling them, “Hey, if you want me, can you please call this number instead of the number I put on the application?”

And it’s all sort of confusing and I don’t think it helps my chances of getting a job.

I’ve applied to work at a Duck Thru gas station down the street from the house.

I’ve applied to work at a Dollar General down the street from the house, too.

Neither of them have gotten back to me yet.

I close my laptop and I feel sweaty and hungry and I think I should take a shower even though I know I’m going to do pushups and sit-ups and planks later in the day.

I take a shower anyway.

I’ve been working out again because it helps me feel productive and also because I don’t like my body and I want Ashleigh to like my body.

I’ve showered and dressed and I make a grilled cheese sandwich and I eat it and then it’s hot in the house and I strip down to my boxers and put my shoes on and do pushups and sit-ups and planks and I’m covered in sweat and I take another shower and while I’m in the shower I think about how Ashleigh is at her job right now and she’s doing her job and she’s making money.

And I get out of the shower and I dry off and I put on the same clothes I wore after I took my first shower and then I open up my laptop.

There’s an email from Ashleigh and it’s a bunch of links to a bunch of jobs and some of them look good or good enough and I am grateful.

She’s at her job and she’s emailing me links to other jobs so that I can have a job too.

I apply to all of the jobs she sends me and one of them is a job working in the bookstore at the small university where I applied to work as a public safety officer.

And one of them is working as some kind of office assistant at some office and I can’t tell what it is that the people in the office do or with what they need assistance but I apply anyway and goddamnit I hope they call me, or Ashleigh, I hope they call Ashleigh and ask for me so that I can work there for a few days, or maybe a few weeks, maybe a month, and hate it and quit and go through all of this again.

And then it’s 4:45 and I’ve got to make sure I did all of the dishes and make sure I didn’t make some kind of mess in the house because I’m going to go pick up Ashleigh from work and she can’t come home to a mess.

It wouldn’t be fair.

I am a stay at home dad who doesn’t have any children.

When I told Ashleigh this, she pointed at all of the plants in the house and told me that I do have children.

The plants are my children.

If that’s the case then I am a bad father because a lot of them are dying.

I try to get to the insurance firm right on time but I get there early and I see the other employees again and I don’t know what to do so I wave and a man with a beard shrugs and waves back at me and gets in his truck.

He pulls out of the parking lot and then Ashleigh comes out of the building and she comes up to the driver’s side window and says, “I want to drive.”

So I get out and I get in the passenger seat and Ashleigh drives us back home where I’ve been all day and where my plant children are dying.

She asks me what I did all day and I tell her that I didn’t do too much and I ask her the same thing and she tells me about how maybe she’s going to buy some life insurance for herself but she’s not sure yet and I don’t know what that is or why she needs it now and I don’t know if she knows either.

We pull up in front of the house and we sit in the car and let the cool air conditioning blow on us.

“I feel like it should be the other way around,” I say. “I feel like I should be the one with the boring job and you should be here, writing good books.”

“Well, this is like what Carson McCullers and her husband did. She’d work a boring job while he wrote books and then he’d get a boring job while she wrote books.”

Ashleigh turns off the car and the cool air stops blowing.

“What was her husband’s name?” I ask. “Who was Carson McCullers married to?”

“Hmm,” Ashleigh says and then she sighs. “You know, I forget who he was.”

That’s a tough call and I might have to dodge the question by insisting they’re the same thing. I’ve always said the connection between a writer and a reader is like a settled relationship – one in which you take your time, learn about each other, go back and start again when needed. The connection between a speaker and an audience on the other hand is like a wild one night stand.

Los Angeles or Vienna?

That’s definitely not the same thing. That the grass is always greener on the other side is annoyingly true. As I write this, the temperature in Vienna is a balmy 28F. Do not complain to me on Skype, or to anyone else in the world how hot it is. We will hate you for it. But, I do miss the poetry scene in the US. Vienna, though, is a more organized place with a better social and health system, transport and sexy lederhosen.

Billy Collins or Mexican food?

I think Billy Collins is easier to digest and you tend to fart a lot less after a few of his poems. I genuinely like his work, have a few books at home, but it does slightly unnerve me that major bookstores don’t take a chance on anyone but the established names. Ask any British or Irish poet to name American poets and the majority will mention Collins, Hughes, Plath, Bukowski; in a similar way Americans when pressed for British or Irish poets or writers will come up with Heaney, Joyce, Yeats, and Heaney again. I always feel so happy to discover a new book, a new publisher or a new voice. I just finished “Early Hour” by Michael McGriff (Copper Canyon). It’s the stuff magic comes a distant second to. I’m also keeping an eye on Write Bloody and their catalogue.

Eating sushi with a fork or walking down a stalled escalator?

“The beautiful must be incongruous.” So said Julien Torma (4 Dada Suicides). If things went according to plan every day, I would say life becomes boring, over-predictable. On saying that, we all love a good whine – especially the Viennese; it’s part of the culture. I also know plenty of people who are “so stressed right now” and “are super busy right now”. It might be fair to say we need conflict, someone or something to throw a spanner in the works; a good poem needs it, a story needs it. But sushi with a fork is so wrong.

Reading a book of poems or going to the movies?

I really enjoy the movies I have to say. There’s something about pulling down your flip-seat and settling into that giant screen that Netflix and the likes will never recreate. But I couldn’t do that 5 days a week – I couldn’t afford to. A book of poems though is there to be dipped into every coffee break, on your morning commute, whenever the fancy takes you. I always find that with (good) poetry, you can say as much with so few words as can be read in a 100 page book or viewed in a 2 hour movie.

A Pulitzer or an Oscar?

A Pulitzer, no questions about it. An Oscar is great, but it’s more about the individual and their talents. I think any kind of writing award, be it a Pulitzer, the Griffin etc., is also a tip of the hat to the publisher and hopefully draws more attention to them and the other poets whom they publish.

]]>http://thenervousbreakdown.com/nmccarthy/2018/08/neil-mccarthy-the-tnb-self-interview/feed/1How to Kill a Pighttp://thenervousbreakdown.com/nmccarthy/2018/08/how-to-kill-a-pig/
http://thenervousbreakdown.com/nmccarthy/2018/08/how-to-kill-a-pig/#respondMon, 06 Aug 2018 03:42:11 +0000http://thenervousbreakdown.com/?p=129711I expected them to tell me that my bacon
had come from a happy pig, one that had had a full life,
was corn fed and had free range, did yoga in the mornings,
played the cello, spoke Latin and learned
to salsa dance while visiting relatives in Cuba.
I thought maybe there would have been a photo album
to accompany the sacrifice, documenting its first birthday,
first snow and first of everything else,
here an oink, there an oink.

In far corners, I dubbed the mouths of others,
their new voices outbattling the clattering gunnery of plates
slamming down organic everythings.
I gifted one woman berating her phone the French language
to make her all the more endurable.
Sweet as raw cane sugar to my fair trade coffee,
I had the young couple across from me nattering fondly
from their deathbeds; their soon-to-be-left world
better off now than it was when they were younger.

The child in the high chair wanted in on the action,
breaking into L’enfant et les sortilèges when faced
with a spoonload of non-GMO beige matter.
I used a sortilege of my own in stripping the walls clean
and emblazoning the newspaper headlines all
over them to see if anyone would notice, remark, question
that one glaring absence as Truth was led out the back,
strung up by its hind legs, throat slit, left to hang there
until the last drop of blood spattered into the bucket.

I guess it’s the wordplay; the truly infinite number of ways that exist for using language and syntax in poetry that other genres don’t allow. Poetry by its own nature adheres to something ineffable and far more embracing than the Chicago Style Manuel. Restrictions that hinder creativity annoy me anyway. Poetry, on the other hand, is viscerally and emotionally freeing.

As a long time choreographer and teacher of improvised performance arts, I learned from the very beginning that any individual’s freely flowing and naturally occurring continuum of creative thought and action is hindered only by their own private wounds and learned or imposed behaviors. Most teaching of improvisation actually involves unlearning habitual patterns. And all writing at its inception is improvised. For me writing poetry is remedial work for the creative spirit. I love that work. The need for it, is at the core of my driving interest in writing poetry for the last 20 years.

Do you actually write every day?

I do, though sometimes it may only be a list on my way to a full day of activities. But most of my days really do include some reading, research, conscious exploration, and actual writing. And of those writerly days, some are much more fruitful than others, and when I say fruitful, I don’t just mean work that actually lands on the page and is published, but any and all writing that starts out somewhere and leaves you off somewhere else. That is good writing in my mind.

What is your first experience of being moved by poetry.

My grandmother used to sing to me. She was an immigrant from Lithuania, who came to the US during the Pogroms. Since her English was not good enough to translate the lullabies she knew as a child, she would simply choose a few syllables, and repeat them over and over in tune with the melody. I truly believe that was my first experience of meter even before actual words came into the picture. My first foray into traditional poetry, was in Middle School, when I was assigned to memorize Oh Captain, My Captain. I was hooked. And then when I got into theatre, Shakespeard. The Sonnets. Oh yes, captivated.

What do you think your poetry says?

Well???….I know what it doesn’t say. Nothing much too lofty or smart or educational. My poetry asks a lot of questions. It looks at love, landscapes, the natural world, politics, superstitions and juxtapositions. Paradox and confusion play large roles. Nature and the eroticism of being in a human body factor in. Adventure and the unknown capture me. Stories bump up against each other, often in one very short poem. I don’t think of it as a deficit of attention, but a plethora of making connection.

]]>http://thenervousbreakdown.com/pdobreer/2018/08/peggy-dobreer-the-tnb-self-interview-2/feed/0A Dress to Die Forhttp://thenervousbreakdown.com/pdobreer/2018/08/a-dress-to-die-for/
http://thenervousbreakdown.com/pdobreer/2018/08/a-dress-to-die-for/#respondFri, 03 Aug 2018 16:06:47 +0000http://thenervousbreakdown.com/?p=129702Parachutes have risen
and structures of fashion
have shifted in the foyer.

Prestigious and versatile,
the concierge collects
luxury gifts. She drinks
the beverage before her,

sucks air too loudly to sigh.
A carnage of orchids
dries on Spanish tile. A red
pepper turns in the bowl.

The room yawns and fragments
of this odd assemblage fall from
the tongues of the terrace. No
word is offered to frame reflections
found in the lobby mirror.

The solstice swaggers the turn
of the screw to her jaw. A concert
of anarchy plays on her dress falling
open just above the knee.

I’ll allow the issue of boy having a troubled history to speak for itself. Except to add that Black jazz musicians in the 40s began calling each other man because of the Jim Crow practice of referring to them as boys. This then is the root of the all-encompassing pronoun-slash-exclamation man used by most musicians, then bleeding into beatniks and out to many other bonded male groups: athletes, actors, (poets?).

But also, while women don’t mind (even, in my case, prefer) to be called girls, men don’t usually refer to themselves, individually, as boys. As in I’m a boy who likes ___. Yes, there’s the old standard one of the boys. Or boys’ night out. Or even my boys (although that could mean the male anatomy that comes in a pair, but I’ve never heard a woman refer to her breasts or ovaries as “my girls.”)

There was no number-crunching for men seeking heterosexual relationships who referred to themselves as boys. I suspect gay men do not refer to themselves, nor the partners they are seeking, as boys.

There’s an intellectual argument made for why women should reject being called girls. I don’t know why I prefer girl to woman. It doesn’t, I don’t think, have to do with age. I don’t dress like my college students, but I think I also don’t dress like a woman.

Those words like a woman reverberated in the air for a few minutes, sending me here:

She takes just like a woman,
She makes love just like a woman,
And she aches just like a woman
But she breaks just like a little girl.

Bob Dylan’s critics over the years debated whether he was being misogynistic in “Just Like a Woman.” The New York Times: “there’s no more complete catalogue of sexist slurs,” and “defines women’s natural traits as greed, hypocrisy, whining and hysteria.” Allmusic: “There is nothing in the text to suggest that Dylan has a disrespect for, much less an irrational hatred of, women in general.” Admittedly, the first quote from a woman (Marion Mead) the second by a man (Bill Janovitz).

Yet the misogyny never occurred to me. I always both wanted to be the person Dylan was singing about, and knew I was at best only half of her. The takes part I assumed was related to the makes love part, assuming both had to do with intercourse, because I was first listening to the song as a skittish virgin, and then as a recently not-virgin-any-longer but one for whom sex was difficult; the next line, aches, was my experience with sex (although ache too soft a word for my pain). I did not take nor make love like any woman I’d ever read about or seen on a screen, but it did hurt plenty. So I recognized I broke like a little girl.

Further evidence for me that this song was about my sex life:

And your long-time curse hurts
But what’s worse
Is this pain in here
I can’t stay in here
Ain’t it clear that.
I just can’t fit
Yes, I believe it’s time for us to quit

I might add here that I thought the words to the jazz standard “The Nearness of You” were:

It’s not the pain– oooo

That excites me

That thrills and delights me, oh no …

(In case anyone wonders: “It’s not the pale moon …”)

So girl has never affronted me. I don’t have children, I don’t have a little black dress, I don’t have either heels or pumps or flats. I have some make-up I haven’t attempted to use for 15 years (I think old make-up decays. I should check). I do go to a hair stylist. Usually, at the end, when she asks if I want any stuff in my hair (hairspray, styling product, etc.) I decline. These places used to be called beauty shops. Where one, I suppose, bought beauty the way one bought meat in a meat shop.

Basically, I say I’m a girl, or I’m female. I might ask “Why are there no women writers listed here,” and yes, I’ll include myself in the absent names. The term women’s literature is one of the greatest affronts of all. Because there hasn’t been a category of men’s literature.

But personally, being a girl is okay. And as long as I can still sit on the floor cross-legged and stand up directly from that position, I’ll take it. So, girlfriend; that’s okay too, and, after all, for all female friends, does anyone say “she’s a womanfriend of mine”?

But at what age can a man still be comfortable with boyfriend? Unlike girlfriend, boyfriend never for a man means his male buddies. For gay men in their 40s and 50s, if they’re still unmarried, how do they refer to their partners? Yes, some still use partner. I like partner too. But I can also have partners in other kinds of ventures and sub-sets of life.

A man I’m seeing has come into use. When I tried it, my partner cringed. “You’re seeing me? Is that what we’re doing?” Sharing a house, a bedroom, a bed, meals, clean-up, TV shows and movies, snow-shoveling, dog-poop pick-up and lawn-mowing, grocery shopping and exercising. Everything. Plus reminiscing. But if I say he’s my man, then I’m back to contending with being his woman. That word again, but adding troublesome possessive pronouns. The aggravating aura for me is not, like for feminists in the 70s and 80s, the word man appearing in woman (so they changed the spelling to womyn). For me, maybe, it’s the implied womb in woman. And at this point my knees should be buckling at the edge of an analyst’s sofa.

Except I also loathe lady. Who doesn’t?

Dylan went from “Just like a Woman” (1966) to “Lay, Lady Lay” (1969). Given my lifelong sexual issues, I did not ever wish to be associated with the subject of the later song. Nor would it have been better Lie, Lady Lie, which is grammatically correct (considering Dylan denied that the lyrics were sexual).

Other “women” in songs I wished I could associate myself with: the “She’s Always a Woman” in Billy Joel’s 1977 flipside to “Just the Way You Are,” and I preferred to put these two messages together, that I was always that woman (or girl) just the way I was. And Joel’s “Modern Woman” in 1986. “With a long cool stare she aggravates the tension …” My boyfriend (partner) says, yes, I did. But my song was the not-yet-written “Always a poser to you.”

And here my desiring to be the girl in a song might have ended. 1986. When my now boyfriend moved 100 miles away to marry someone else, because I was already married to someone else and he said it was killing him to stand around watching me be someone else’s wife. (Wife. There’s a word that needs looking at.) It took twenty-five years, but now he’s standing around watching me be his _____.

We’ll have to discuss the word baby another time.

]]>http://thenervousbreakdown.com/cmazza/2018/08/like-a-boyfriend/feed/0TNB Book Club in August: Circa, by Adam Greenfieldhttp://thenervousbreakdown.com/admin/2018/08/tnb-book-club-in-august-circa-by-adam-greenfield/
http://thenervousbreakdown.com/admin/2018/08/tnb-book-club-in-august-circa-by-adam-greenfield/#respondWed, 01 Aug 2018 18:00:31 +0000http://thenervousbreakdown.com/?p=129698This month, the book club will be reading Circa, the terrific debut novel by Adam Greenfield. Available from Pelekinesis.

Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Allie Rowbottom. Her new book is called Jell-O Girls: A Family History (Little, Brown). Her essays can be found in Vanity Fair, Salon,The Florida Review, No Tokens, The South Loop Review, PQueue, Hunger Mountain, The Rumpus, A Women’s Thing and elsewhere.

As I drove further away from downtown, the houses and sidewalks became progressively neglected. Like forgotten memories in an old attic. Like the unloved pages of an old dusty photo album, some complete, yet frayed–overflowing with used-up cheer. Others, abandoned, with only the peculiar unblinking gaze of an unnamed child–questioning and accusing all at once—staring out from among dubious, brown, square-shaped stains, the only proof that there was more to the story; that more had once existed. Proof that here was once a happy, bustling, productive community. A thoroughfare of dreams, once cherished and kept tidy and neat, to proudly display the depth of love, the fullness of life, of one family. One community. With its empty lots between every other house and its broken sidewalks and time-tested aluminum fences dislocated by century-old oak trees, Columbia’s North Main Street was such a forgotten piece of history.

I remember late spring mornings in the 1970s, when milk bottles waited by screen doors on front porches lined with rocking chairs and a profusion of flower pots bursting with a multitude of bright, colorful southern promises; virtual assurances of lazy summer days ahead, of shiny new opportunities sure to come to those who worked hard and kept their heads down; I remember the brawny men in suspenders and wide-brim hats, with five-o’clock shadows, booming laughter, and infectious grins, proudly clutching their paychecks, coming home at dusk to the smell of fried chicken, okra, and candied yams. The dreams, the laughter, the promises; all gone now. And in their place lay crackheads on cracked sidewalks, empty-looking, like haunting brown squares in a dusty old photo album abandoned in an attic.

What changed everything? What changed a once-vibrant thoroughfare into half-abandoned rot and ruin? After twelve years abroad, I return to live in the United States and am faced with this need to know.

I worry about what this says about me. How I come from here but have changed. After living abroad in neighborhoods barely altered over centuries of pestilence and conquest, I am ashamed that the place I come from is such a broken shell, apparently devoid of the spirit to renew or reinvent itself.

I ask my eighty-year-old grandmother about this and she says that crack cocaine is to blame. I ask my uncle and he patiently explains that the prison industrial complex, minimum mandatories, and the War on Drugs are the reason. I ask an older cousin on her way from church who waves a dog-eared bible in the air and exclaims it’s “all on account of the loose morals and lack of faith in God!”

I even ask the nun who runs the oldest women’s shelter in Columbia, South Carolina, the nun who I am going to visit that day to offer my services for volunteer work with displaced women. She responds cooly, “These women do not need positive thinking or self-esteem talks. They are just drug addicts and all they care about is their next fix. We keep them here for a couple of days until they move on. They don’t want to change anything.”

She says this to me after looking me up and down at the locked screen door and skeptically asking, “Mary? Mary for the appointment? The volunteer life coach is you?”

Ouch. I am not sure how I was supposed to be looking—No, wait. That’s not true, I do know. I was supposed to be looking white.

Now, I could be wrong. She could have had all kinds of rocks in her shoe that day, or simply been the rare unpleasant non-profit director with poor communication skills. But I expected that a nun and representative of a charity would at least have an open mind. So even if I had shown up with sixteen heroine needles sticking out of my arm, her crestfallen response still would have made me think her a racist. Because that is always what a black person thinks when a white person is rude. We can’t help it. The way an abused woman might flinch when someone next to her raises their hand unexpectedly or a veteran with PTSD ducks when they hear a sudden clang of a garbage pail cover falling to the ground. To a hammer everything is a nail. And we? We are the hammer.

I thought, so much for my idea to volunteer as a way to learn about and try to help this situation, before judging. The person (yes, one person, as in, there is just one women’s shelter in the capitol of South Carolina, and seventeen in the whole state) entrusted with helping seems to consider herself a gate-keeper of misery. Only there to make sure these women suffer in peace.

***

Many neighborhoods across the US that were vibrant in the 70s and 80s now look like they have been through war. Half-abandoned, worn-out streets, stripped of children and life.

My family has suffered a similar decline.

We all live twenty miles outside of town on the overgrown haphazardly sub-divided remnants of my great great grandfather’s 200-acre farm. Five years ago, at the age of fifty-six, my mother died of a ruptured ulcer. She was home alone and her body lay there for three days until one of her three sisters who live within sixty feet came in to check on her and found her laying in a pool of her own vomit on the floor by the foot of her bed. Her sisters say she must have gotten up to make it to the bathroom. I am dismayed that her body lay there alone for days, I think my family unloving, but she was mentally ill and often told family to stay away and the coroner says she was dead before she hit the ground. I decided to write about her so her tortuous young life would not be forgotten. This is why I moved into the three-bedroom luxury trailer I bought her years earlier on our family’s land. I figured it would also be my chance to do some aquaponics projects I’ve been wanting to do. The government paid my grandfather to stop farming the land years before. I secretly believed this was the impetus for our decline and this was a chance to bring back the purpose to this place and to myself.

My fancy European and New York fashion friends would never approve, though. They would say incredulously, “You are now living in a TRAILER? As in a trailer park?” No. Not as in a trailer park. As in, my family has lived here on this land for over 200 years and when seven southern siblings reach adulthood and don’t want to leave home, they simply purchase a movable residence, I prefer to call it a mobile home, and place it next door, on said family land. But I don’t say that, instead I will say that I’m going to build a Tiny House, and ditch the double-wide, that way they will be awed instead at my quirky ingeniousness, and believe I want to live here, not that I have to live here because I am broken, by promises and their men, profound overwhelming sadness and disappointment, and the relentless strivings of city life. Besides I own this unsellable land. I have nowhere else to belong. It’s hard barren dirt is in my blood. But, they don’t know anything about our complicated tenancy in common land ownerships or that black people come in hillbilly too. That some black people owned slaves. I don’t know why that comes as such a surprise to some. The real story of the American South has more plot holes than an episode of the Dukes of Hazard. With astounding frequency here blacks and whites are related by blood, yet no one can really get ahead. Everyone is stuck, working hard to maintain a distance that, no matter how polite, simply isn’t there By what magic could black people, living on the same spot for 200+ years, possibly develop green eyes, red hair and Irish last names? Not since the Great Migration has anyone ever moved away—except to die in all major world wars. You do the math.

My fancy friends also don’t know that, like whites, all black people are not created equal. Poor and rich, city and country folks, the educated and uneducated are worlds apart. Let me put it this way: You could grow up in Philly and become a filmmaker, or perhaps a judge and end up in Bel Air, and your sister still lives in Philly and sends you her son when he gets in trouble on the inner-city basketball court. Or your cleaning business could boom and you and your family could move from the ghetto up to the east side. But that’s all city blacks. We are more like Queen Sugar after the farm died. Small town children of generations of farmers, we are not particularly ambitious, criminal, or even street smart. But they wouldn’t know that, because there are so few media representations of rural African Americans. My family isn’t poor or desperate, nor are we wealthy and cultured. We are just country and mean and squabbling and vindictive. We keep valuable cars on cement blocks until they rot right before our eyes, like our unsupported dreams.

Our intentions are on blocks too.

We marry our third cousins and we hold grudges for decades with other parts of the family down the road or through the woods. And when someone dies, we sneak in the back door and steal their photo albums and hide them until our sisters stop asking about them—even if that takes years. We are jealous. We’re superstitious. Selfish.

Long ago, before cellphones and credit cards, we milked cows, gathered eggs and planted okra and squash and ate rabbits, possums and squirrels, raccoons and deer. Now we are strictly Mountain Dew and drive-thru windows. But more than ever, we are the big C. Christians, more Christian now than we were thirty years ago when we were merely “good people” and our few white cousins that didn’t try to burn our house down or run us off the road for fun were “good wat folks.” My pre-teen first-cousins have $600 cell phones and the lights are often out at their house because after driving up and down the road all month, eating fast food and buying more extravagant clothes to wear nowhere, there is never anything left over to pay the electricity bill—the only actual bill they’ve got, since their trailer is paid for and their water comes from the well out back. I expect they charge their cellphones in the car. Laptop? What laptop? That was either stolen by another cousin long ago or destroyed by some destructive child and no one has ever bothered to get it repaired. Why? Well, that’s just not something we do. Repair stuff. Their mother, my aunt Lettie Mae, has designer furniture, and bags and bags of dirty clothes stacked in her bedroom closet. Instead of fixing her laundry machine, she buys new clothes and buys new cell phones for her children. Presumably this will make them better Christians. My aunt used to be a vibrant fun girl, with big ideas and laughter quickly bubbling from her lips, but now she is someone important in the family church, riddled with disease and only smiles at gossip. She calls me “devil child” behind my back and won’t speak directly to me since the day I told her I was a Buddhist and I didn’t agree that God was sending her sister, my aunt Zee, to hell because she married the Pakistani Muslim guy from the Sizzle Spot gas station. Buddhism, according to her, is the work of the devil and merits the coldest of shoulders.

My aunt Zee’s car breaks down frequently because she only fills the gas tank $2 at a time. Someone’s got to go get her with a can of gas. It has to be me, I won’t lend anyone my car. I’m the only woman at home in the day (all others work twenty miles away in town) and the men can’t drive, they’ve all lost their license. The women drive them everywhere, until the day the men get drunk or find another love interest, and then they steal the women’s cars and get arrested for driving drunk or without a license—country boys think driving drunk and without a license is their God-given right. And then the women defend them, bail them out and the whole mess starts all over again.

***

My cousin, Eli, is the pit bull whisperer and he appears from the woods at all hours and drinks little airplane bottles of liquor in my back yard at the tree line. I know because he is the only person who could do this—my aunt Alfie’s pit bulls nor any other dog in the region dares bark at his arrival. One day, he has a huge argument with my grandmother and I try to restore order. He replies that he is a gangster. As if that means he can fly. I say, Sure, all gangsters live with their grandmothers and have to beg them for gas money.

I realize then that he is severely mentally ill, not like cousin Gaddy with the three purple hearts and plate in his skull who walks the country roads in alternating states of agitation or inebriation, but ill, like my cousin Andy, my aunts Lacey, Roberta, Zee, and Lettie Mae. Like my grandmother, my grandfather, and my mother—the only one to actually seek the psychiatrist’s couch, which only got her drugged up, ridiculed, and estranged. Were they always ill? Generally, we southerners, and black people, don’t look kindly on the mental health professions—like they aren’t really jobs or maybe life has taught us that talking to strangers in confidence is something deadly, outrageous and unthinkable. So, people stay sick– but no one recognizes it or calls it that–unless they’re to the point of mumbling incoherently. Instead, mental illness is chalked up as personality quirks or something that can be prayed away in church. I see the same symptoms all across the south and I wonder if that’s what made the North Main Street and similar communities decline or did the illness come with the decline of the communities? That it was never just the crack, the prison industrial complex or the war on drugs. Not the loose morals or the lack of faith in God. These are all just symptoms of a collective madness that grips us.

*names have been changed because the truth hurts

]]>http://thenervousbreakdown.com/mmcbeth/2018/07/main-street-madness/feed/4High Noon: A Review of Lawrence Osborne’s Philip Marlowe Novel Only to Sleephttp://thenervousbreakdown.com/jpsmith/2018/07/high-noon-a-review-of-lawrence-osbornes-philip-marlowe-novel-only-to-sleep/
http://thenervousbreakdown.com/jpsmith/2018/07/high-noon-a-review-of-lawrence-osbornes-philip-marlowe-novel-only-to-sleep/#respondThu, 26 Jul 2018 18:21:59 +0000http://thenervousbreakdown.com/?p=129672At first glance it seems a thankless assignment: to write a new Raymond Chandler novel featuring his iconic detective Philip Marlowe. I suppose it would be like taking on a sequel to Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” and then you think: what the hell can I do with Gregor Samsa now? Hasn’t he been through enough? I don’t know what Lawrence Osborne’s first thoughts were when the Chandler estate approached him with this opportunity, but, knowing something of his previous novels, I think he’s a most interesting choice for the exercise, and the resulting work makes him seem inevitable.

Prior to this, sequels—or, rather, more properly speaking, new novels featuring the setting and the character of Philip Marlowe—have, with the blessings of the estate, been undertaken by Robert B. Parker and John Banville (writing as his alter-detective-writing-ego Benjamin Black). Now British-born, Bangkok-based Lawrence Osborne has been anointed to tackle this job, but if you know any of Osborne’s novels, the whole idea of it is highly intriguing.

Lawrence Osborne has been compared to Graham Greene, but apart from their both having lived in various exotic locales (including, in Osborne’s case, a stint as a reporter on the California-Mexico border a few decades back, which gives him street cred for the novel’s locale), and having an abiding interest in how the outsider in a foreign country can be drawn into the cultural conspiracy of that place, there is a difference. Greene was motivated by concepts of good and evil that rode in on the tide of his conversion to Catholicism, ebbing and flowing as the years passed, with it the colder currents of doubt; Osborne, on the other hand, strikes me as a deeply secular writer, more interested in characters who find themselves in places other than home, whose innocence is dented and sometimes crushed by their new surroundings, customs, and beliefs until they are consumed by a culture they had barely come to comprehend.

So in taking on the opportunity to create a new story for the iconic Philip Marlowe he is working well within his own tradition. The detective still has a head full of all the smartest metaphors as he walks a whole new grid of mean streets where, as he puts it, “even the old language has disappeared…. A hotel room in Anaheim in 1957; another in Sacramento, maybe the late 1940s. The sound of jukeboxes and dive bars next door and characters long dead are suddenly alive again and chattering in my ear. Guys with names that people don’t have any more. A Malone, a Sam Something there, a Max over there by the window. A Lipschultz dead in his casino office.” A whole new world for Philip Marlowe. New as in old, that is. Bienvenidos a Mexico.

We know Marlowe’s voice because we’ve heard it before, coming from the lips of Humphrey Bogart in a plot scrambled like eggs for a Sunday breakfast for ten convicts in The Big Sleep, but Bogie nailed it for generations to come. Though other actors have taken a shot at it, it’s Elliot Gould’s loose-limbed, jazzed-up, eminently-watchable performance in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye that reenergized and redefined the role with a whole new bag of tics and wisecracks. Marlowe’s is the voice of a man who wishes to be a moral force of one, filtered through the acid eye of an L.A. cynic. Los Angeles. City of Light. City of Angels, city of Demons. A place where people vanish, either at the hands of others, or on their own volition, fleeing into the hinterlands east of the city or to the scrublands on the margins of the San Fernando Valley. L.A.’s a place where people come to lose themselves and find a new face, a new name, a sizzling new future. Maybe. Just not always. And you can take that to the bank, sweetheart.

Now seventy-two and creeping his inexorable way towards whatever might lie beyond in numerals or otherwise, Marlowe in Only to Sleep has been drawn out of retirement for all the best reasons, ones faithful Chandler readers will recognize: Donald Zinn, a year younger than Marlowe and married to a woman half his age, goes for a swim one night in a cove. His body is recovered and cremated, sizzling into ash perhaps a bit too precipitously. Naturally, the insurance company wants to be sure there was no funny business in the whole matter. After all, a suicide or a death incurred during the course of a crime would fundamentally alter the liability payments to the grieving widow. And whose body was actually cremated…? Sure, you can go to L.A. to disappear, but Osborne’s Marlowe knows better; it’s in Mexico where you can get good and lost. Maybe even forever.

It’s a rather dull life, Philip Marlowe’s, at least these days. Now drowsing in the heat of a Mexican summer, relying on the aide of a silver-tipped cane hiding a lethal Japanese blade. “You have your books and your movies, your daydreams and your moments in the sun, but none of these can save you any more than irony can.” He takes the job and heads north to San Diego to meet the dead man’s widow, Dolores Araya, who still runs the resort they’d created in the desert. There’s always a dame in a Marlowe novel, isn’t there. This one’s a treat. Especially as she’s one half of an insurance scam.

Anyone who writes their version of a character and a world already created by someone else works at a disadvantage. For one, it’s not your world and definitely not your character. But what Lawrence Osborne has done here is to reimagine Philip Marlowe in a world that he knows all too well. His novels have always been about Abroad. It’s enticed writers from the nineteenth century Romantic movement to D. H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and many of the great British travel writers. Not to mention American expatriate Henry James, for whom abroad was in some ways like Osborne’s: a place to which people are drawn, a place in which people are lost to their fate. Or to the fates of others.

Lawrence Osborne is one of the most interesting authors writing today. A man who has lived seemingly everywhere, he has a knowledge of both being an outsider and someone in on the goods. His Marlowe is equally wistful and world-weary. “Count me as one of those who know that life is unbearable not because it’s a tragedy but because it’s a romance. Old age only makes it worse, because now the race against time has reached the hour of high noon.”

In such novels as The Forgiven, Hunters in the Dark, and Beautiful Animals, Osborne is a subtle observer not just of the displaced, the adrift, the relocated, the men and women who either adapt to their new culture or fall under its spell, before ending up as prey to the shimmery airborne forces of its gods and demons, its customs and secrets, its thieves and killers. But Marlowe isn’t lost in Mexico. He knows his way around. Where he is unanchored is in his age.

Always laconic, forever a man who could talk his way out messes and charm a witness (or, indeed, a suspect), he seems now less sure of himself. The 1990s setting of the novel is a very different world from his salad days when he worked L.A. and environs with his wit and, sometimes, his pistol. I relished the details of this novel that could have only come from someone who had lived there, and lived deeply, who understands what foreign really means. He has taken a Chandlerian plot, filtered it through the mind of an autumnal Philip Marlowe, and given us a story that haunts in its details, its corners, its shadows and in its ghosts. At night they all come back, the clients I once had in their magnificent houses just as they were in 1940 or 1952. The whiskey flows, the banter is sharp and sexually compressed, and sunlight pours over majestic lawns and driveways.

]]>http://thenervousbreakdown.com/jpsmith/2018/07/high-noon-a-review-of-lawrence-osbornes-philip-marlowe-novel-only-to-sleep/feed/0Nineteen Questions with Paul Seward MD, author of Patient Carehttp://thenervousbreakdown.com/ehosier/2018/07/nineteen-questions-with-paul-seward-md-author-of-patient-care/
http://thenervousbreakdown.com/ehosier/2018/07/nineteen-questions-with-paul-seward-md-author-of-patient-care/#commentsWed, 25 Jul 2018 18:26:03 +0000http://thenervousbreakdown.com/?p=129657My Memoir, My Self is a series devoted to writers who suck at making things up.]]>Get to know me: I die for books but I live for television. The former is my bff, the latter is my one true love. Give me a meaty, well-written drama with an ensemble cast of Emmy nominees who can transport me to another time, place, or life experience, and I’ll binge it on a loop until it becomes embedded in my emotional memory like a song. Earlier this year, ER, the 15-seasons-long saga of daily life at County General in Chicago from the perspective of its emergency department, finally became available to stream (on Hulu). Created by novelist Michael Crichton, the show debuted in 1994 and holds up like a motherfucker; even its so-called bad seasons toward the end that no longer included anyone from the original cast make Grey’s Anatomy look like General Hospital when it comes to its medicine. Never pandering to its audience, ER calls procedures by their proper names and manages to educate, even as it works to destroy you emotionally with its too-often relatable human dramas. So, for months I’ve been watching all 335 hours of the show at home. Since episodes are often on as background noise the way some people do with NPR, I figured I’ve absorbed at least 1,000 hours of medical school by now, practically a junior resident. Right when I was missing the high of seeing an undiscovered episode ever again, I had the pleasure of meeting editor Megha Majumdar at Catapult, who told me about Paul Seward, MD, a now-retired pediatrician turned emergency department specialist, whose first book Patient Care is just as mesmerizing a read as seasons 1 – 4 are to watch. I couldn’t put it down.

What’s more difficult, getting a medical license or a book deal? Both involve saving lives, obviously.

To get a medical license you must spend years learning how to be a doctor. It’s hard. But if you have some aptitude, and keep putting one foot ahead of the other, you will probably succeed. To get a book deal, you must spend years learning how to write. But if you have some aptitude, and keep putting one foot ahead of the other, you will still probably not succeed. My current agent, Wendy Levinson, was the twenty-sixth to whom I submitted a query. You must have written something that is at least “good,” but it also helps to have the luck to find the rare person who likes it enough to risk their own professional reputation on you. For that, “luck” is not a good enough word; it does not express the gratitude I feel.

Have you always been a writer?

I have been writing all my life, but not for publication. I did it for fun, for relaxation, for comfort. (I have lots of bad poetry in my bottom drawer.) And I have published a few professional publications, and two philosophy papers. Back in the early nineties I wrote a novel. It went nowhere. I rewrote it about five years ago. Once again, nowhere. So, I took a course in writing nonfiction and wrote the first two stories in the book. My wife liked them – much better than the novel, so I wrote more. And here we are.

What’s your process?

I try to write at least five hundred words a day – or rewrite about a thousand. I succeed anywhere from zero times a week, up to six or seven. I write in two stages. The first is to have a general idea in my head and then try to put it on paper as fast as I can, editing nothing, correcting nothing, not trying to make any organized sense, but just letting the story come out randomly on the page. Those sessions usually last about an hour. Then I sit down with that pile of garbage and – word by word, line by line, shoving words around, cutting slashing, changing – I rewrite. That process ends when either I have something I can show to someone else, or it clearly needs to be tossed. That second phase is easily ninety percent of my writing time.

Who are the writers that inspire you? Did you read other books to prepare for the writing of your own?

I am a random and sporadic reader. I can go a few months without reading a book; then I will read four or five. I recently read When Breath Becomes Air and was struck by the line, “When there is no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool.” Humbling. Then there are books I love. These include every science fiction book written in the fifties and sixties. I grew up on Heinlein, Asimov, Pohl, Niven, Leinster etc. The Lord of the Rings trilogy came out during my first year of medical school. I think that cost me one grade point, but it was worth it. Books that I reread include Shogun, and all of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. After seeing Les Miserables for the first time, I read the unabridged novel aloud to my wife. She slept through the entire battle of Waterloo but otherwise was kind. I have a taste for children’s books that really aren’t. The Hobbit; The Narnia series; all of Lewis Carroll; pretty much anything by Neil Gaiman, particularly The Ocean at the End of the Lane, The Anansi Brothers, and Neverwhere; the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman.

Let’s talk medicine. What is the most common reason people come to the ER?

There are only three reasons why people come to an ER: Medical emergencies; informational emergencies; and social emergencies. The first is when they are obviously sick or injured and correctly feel that they need care. The second one sounds similar but is different. They are sick or injured in some way, but don’t know if they need care and come to find out, and if necessary receive it. And the third is maybe the subtlest: they have an illness or an injury and whether or not they think it is dangerous or urgent, they have nowhere else to go. Those are all good reasons for patients to seek health care. The problem is that, too often, the ER is the only place they can find it.

I learned in the book that a sudden onset of sweat can be cause for alarm – that’s a good tip. What is happening in the body when that happens?

Your body has decided that something bad is happening. So you release a hormone called Adrenalin. This causes what is called the “fight or flight” reflex. Your heart rate goes up (that feeds more blood and thus energy to the muscles); Your eyes dilate (you can see better); You breathe faster, (more oxygen to the tissues); The blood vessels in your skin constrict so you get pale (You don’t need blood in the skin, you need it in the muscle); And you sweat – (your body is about to be active, better start dumping excess body heat). You might be sweating for any number of reasons: pain in your belly; low blood sugar; a monster in the living room. But when you are starting to have a big flight or fight reflex while you are lying in bed, at rest and in no obvious danger – then I worry what it is your body knows that I don’t.

You practiced medicine for a few decades. You saw viruses being all but eradicated, and the transformation of the treatment of HIV. What do you think are the biggest threats to public health today?

The biggest public health threats in the world today have nothing to do with medicine. Number one is the potential for nuclear catastrophe. The trajectory of history since Hiroshima has been one of nuclear proliferation in the hands of people who are unqualified to make careful decisions regarding its use. Number two is climate change. It has already produced major disasters in the form of “Hurricane Seasons.” The weather will only get worse.

You’re now retired, but do you find that patients are more informed coming into the ER these days? The internet will make a medical sleuth out of anyone, but even if you just watched tv on the regular, you’d be able to pick up on the basic lingo and procedures. Good thing?

Perhaps, but they may have had access to all sorts of bad information that “must be true, I saw it on the internet.” For example, if people don’t understand drug side effects or interactions, I have to teach them, and if they do know about them I have to be sure that what they “know” is true. There can be lots of surprises. Vaccination phobia is one example. I don’t know what causes autism, but there is no association with vaccination. On the other hand, there is an association with a lack of immunization and present-day damage or death from diseases that used to be as common as colds and now no one remembers.

What recent medical advances most excite you?

The revolution in imaging. MRIs, Pet Scans, MRAs, fiberoptics in the small vessels etc. and the therapies that go along with it – laparoscopic surgery, fiberoptic intubation, ultrasound guided catheterization. From a therapeutic standpoint, it is the increasing use of antigen antibody preparations to target specific tissues. That has already changed the treatment of cancer immensely and will continue to do so. Also I see a growing realization that approaching the body as a bunch of unrelated systems – Cardiovascular, pulmonary, endocrine, etc. is ultimately untrue. All the “systems” relate to one another, and those relationships are both the focus of the illnesses and will increasingly be the focus of the cures.

In one chapter you take the reader through – step by step – the intubation process from the doctor’s perspective. It sounds so tricky, to say the least. Do you remember the first time you intubated a patient, and is that the most pressurized procedure?

The first patients I intubated were premature babies in the Intensive care Nursery at UCSF Medical center in the late sixties. They were a challenge. It’s always a stressful procedure because, while there are lots of physical findings that hint at whether the intubation will be difficult, life is full of surprises. The reason it is so stressful is that, in the ER you will only be doing the procedure on someone who looks like they might die without it. But while it is often a lifesaving procedure, making a mistake and not catching it immediately can kill someone in minutes.

It’s hard to imagine my psychiatrist ever did a surgical rotation. Do all doctors hit all the departments in their training or do you get to skip dermatology? What was your least favorite?

Your psychiatrist not only did a surgical rotation, they did all the others as well. For me, all of them were fascinating. Medical school, while it was one of the most difficult times of my life, was one of the best. It was like climbing a mountain: exhausting, frightening, humbling. It challenged my sense of who I was and what I could do.

There’s a specific energy in the ER and it takes a village to maintain the flow. You touch on some of the roles that make up the team – the paramedic, the clerk, nurses, residents and interns, the attending, patient advocates. Your son is a physician’s assistant, another important part of the ER team…

The correct term is not “Physician’s Assistant”; it is Physician Assistant. There is no possessive relationship. (I must quickly add that my son let me know of my error only a couple of weeks ago, so my book is filled with that mistake.) It is functionally a very similar role to a nurse practitioner. They both require a supervising physician to be able to practice, but otherwise they have considerable leeway in what they can do – as long as their supervisor accepts that responsibility. In many rural ERs, the health care provider on duty is a PA, not an MD. This is not a bad thing.

It always seems like there aren’t enough doctors at a hospital and that they all have too many patients. There are some communities in America that are seriously underserved. What needs to happen to fix this?

My own feeling is that we need to change our categories. The role of “Physician” arose in a time in history in which it was possible for a single person to know everything about the practice of medicine. And that was true pretty much until the early part of the twentieth century. Then such knowledge has been impossible. Additionally, the things physicians do have changed. Some physicians are essentially scientists, some completely devoted to clinical medicine. Some are administrators, lawyers, politicians. At the same time the role of non-physicians in health care is exploding. I believe that we should accord the title Doctor to anyone who is trained and licensed to care for patients. Then we should invent some new terms for the people who supervise them. And we need to look at the amount of time and money that it takes to become a person who can take care of patients. That might solve a lot of supply problems.

What’s involved in all that hospital paperwork?

The only way healthcare professionals can communicate with one another is via the medical record; that’s where the story is. Second, it is used for billing. And third it is a legal document that may be used in a malpractice suit to defend or criticize the care given. All of these are important. The problem is that even with all the technology in the world at our disposal, we have yet to develop the means to create a medical record quickly, accurately, and completely. I wish I could say I understood why that is.

That’s another book. Bagels & cream cheese is the cornerstone of any ER professional’s diet. True or false?

You’re forgetting the Lox. We do drink a lot of coffee – but that turns out to be good for you. Seriously though, I think most of us take care of our diet and exercise more than most. We see the consequences of failing to do so. Where we screw up is failing to adequately manage our need to work nights in a way that does not mess up our circadian rhythms. More and more it is clear that that kills you if you do not respect the need to sleep.

What did you do to blow off steam after a long shift? Do all doctors play golf?

Sleep. I would come home from day shifts, eat dinner, have a glass of wine, and spend some time with my wife talking about each other’s day. Then I would go to bed. If I was coming home in the morning from a night shift, I would eat some breakfast, spend time with my wife, then drink some milk and go to bed. Usually I would sleep till midafternoon and then start to be human. I didn’t usually have any steam left to blow off. When I was younger, my thing was running. I wasn’t training to run marathons; I was running marathons to make myself train. Now I walk, swim, and now and then do some running. But I don’t think there are any more marathons in my future. What is “Golf?”

A common trope of medical dramas is that eventually a character will find his or her loved one in their ER in need of heroic measures. The doctor always ends up being the one to shock the dying loved one with the paddles. Would this happen in real life, or is there a strict policy against treating family members?

The only rule that I know is that you can’t write prescriptions for controlled substances for family members. (Duh.) We try to be informed consultants to our family members when they are seeing their own doctors. That too is not without emotional risk, but it’s the sort of thing that anyone would do. Would I ever defibrillate my own wife? If I was in the room and there was the defibrillator and my wife was in cardiac arrest, hell yes. But so would anybody. As an aside, that’s a good reason to learn CPR and to have an inkling of how to run an AED. (It’s easy. Turn it on and listen to and follow the instructions. Then push the button if it tells you to.) It’s not that you will necessarily save them. But you won’t have to live with the thought that perhaps you could have. A major function of CPR is to reduce the guilt feelings in the participants. Also, sometimes it works.

Is the number one question you’ve been asked at a cocktail party about being a doctor, “Can you really use a pen or plastic straw to perform a tracheotomy?”

First of all a tracheostomy is not an emergency procedure. The emergency procedure is called a “Cricothyrotomy” and it is done higher up, just below the Adam’s apple. And yes, it could be done with a pocket knife. However, it is a dangerous procedure even when done by those who are trained in it. Its not hard to cut a hole in the cricothyroid membrane – but significant bleeding is frequent and unless you already have a good hold on the opening, it is very easy to lose it in the blood and fatty tissue that will fill the wound. Also, you need to have a tube to put in that hole that is big enough to breath through. A soda straw is too small, and it will collapse when you inhale. A pen is a little better but not much, and that’s if the patient is breathing normally. Try it. Take apart a ballpoint pen and try to breath through the hollow part. Do you think it would work for very long? Or that someone else could breathe into it to support you? If they are choking, try the Heimlich maneuver instead.

The number one question I actually get is: ‘You’re an emergency doctor? Man, I bet you’ve seen some crazy stuff, huh?” By that they usually mean objects that people put inside themselves and can’t get out. To me that’s just another variation on taking out a splinter.

People also ask about simultaneous patients, one who is a victim, the other a perpetrator of the same crime. (Pick what you want: auto accident; abuse; armed robbery.) The answer is that you take care of the person in front of you as best you can. You never know what really happened until much later, and it doesn’t matter. Those are questions for the police, for lawyers, for judges. Our job is to take care of the people who present to us to the best of our ability.

Have you ever been the doctor on the plane, the good Samaritan at the restaurant, or happened to come across the scene of an accident?

A few times by the roadside. Mostly in those cases I found that the most important thing I could do was do the ABCs and stabilize the neck, until the EMTs got there, and then get out of their way. The roadside is their venue and they manage it well. Once I was on an airplane when a passenger had a seizure. My treatment was mostly to put him on the floor and make sure he had a good airway and didn’t aspirate vomit. The seizure didn’t last long and, when he woke up, he seemed OK. However, he had never had a seizure before. Because I thought he needed further evaluation promptly, I asked to have an ambulance meet the plane when we landed and take him to the hospital. We were over Connecticut at the time, so the captain came back and asked if we could go on to Boston or did we need to land at a local airport. And now I have a small confession: When he asked me that question, a thought arose from that wonderful part of my brain that will forever be fourteen years old: You know, if you said he needed to turn this plane around and land at Hoboken, then he would turn this plane around and land at Hoboken. You are the MAN. I told the pilot that Boston would be fine.

In the winter of 1992, my sister got married. A year before the wedding, she asked me if I would grow my hair shoulder length for the occasion. At the time, I was twenty years old and just beginning to come to terms with owning a transgender identity (though I didn’t yet have words for it). But the dynamics of my gender “situation” had been playing out in my family life since my earliest memories. Stuffed into dresses for synagogue despite putting up a fight (always a losing battle), or hiding in the dining room so as not to be stuffed into a dress (laying on the chairs tucked under the table) until I (quickly) got too bored to stay there, and then was summarily stuffed into a dress and off we went. I hated dresses, but I actually liked synagogue. The rabbi had a thick New York accent. He was a teller of fables, the kinds with foxes in them, and grapes, and though there was a moral at the end of each story, his stories were about the journey as much as the destination, and he always had a playful lilt to his voice and a twinkle in his eye.

Fights over attire didn’t begin and end at synagogue. I also fought with my mother about what to wear to school. Sometimes I even won those battles, but then my mother sulked, which was never fun. As I moved toward adolescence, my mother told me I would never be loved by anyone but her. That I bothered people and shouldn’t ever call them (well, I should, but only telepathically—and if they didn’t return my “calls” on the actual phone, according to my mother, it meant they didn’t want to talk to me.) My childhood was an obstacle course of troubled dynamics with my mother. Much of the trouble, though certainly not all of it was gender-related.

By my early teens, she was following me around inside and out, stomping her feet and swinging her arms, mimicking the way that I walked, exaggerating my gait, or just fictionalizing it, to make a point—an unkind burlesque. She told me the way I walked was ruining my health—that it was literally injuring me—and tried to train me to walk (and bowl, if you can believe that) (I come from a bowling family) in a more feminine fashion. She brought me to films and told me in graphic detail how I should feel during the heterosexual sexy scenes. In in a frightening hiss, when she dropped me off at softball camp in my sophomore year of high school (in fact, I think this was the first time I’d ever heard her use the word), she ordered me to “stay away from the lesbians.”

Life until college involved my mother constantly trying to police my gender presentation and sexuality (then there was the part where she decided I had special powers and insisted I use them to save her and the rest of the family from all kinds of graphically violent deaths. A story for another time.) And my father kept telling me that no matter what my mother did, it was our job, as a family, to take care of her. Mine, in particular, as she looked to me most for emotional support and turmoil. (He started telling me this at the age of seven…My induction into the family business…)

Where was my sister during all this? I don’t really know. Possibly doing her own thing? But more likely, judging from the way our relationship has played out in adulthood, sorely neglected and forced to witness my mother’s strained focus on me, the constant battles that happened when she wanted me to do something and I said no. (Whenever I didn’t do what my mother wanted, including the “occult” things she believed it was my responsibility to engage in, she cried, withdrew, accused me of being “mean,” of abusing her, often losing her shit in pretty intense ways. She did this when I didn’t want to “practice ESP”. When I didn’t want to try to move objects with my mind powers. When I didn’t want to get hypnotized to ‘talk to dead people’. When I didn’t want her to come into my room at night and hands-on “heal” me.)

So by the time my sister’s wedding came around, my relationship with my parents was fractured at best. My relationship with my sister minimalistic and fraught. Not that we were fighting. Just that we didn’t have a solid connection or understanding of each other, and she was not someone who I could speak to about what was happening with our parents. She seemed indifferent to the fact of my queerness, though resentful of the attention it drew. I tried once to talk to her about my troubled history with our parents, and my sister told me to “forget everything that happened.” That it was my job to take care of the family first, no matter what—to be who and what they needed me to be. I’m not sure how it came about that I became a designated caretaker of my mother, but I think it’s because I somehow, more than anyone, I had the capacity to upset her. Or, I should say, she was perhaps more invested in controlling me than my sister or father, and when I didn’t comply with her wishes, she became distraught, and therefore her breakdowns somehow became my fault.

***

When my sister asked me to grow my hair out for her wedding, I said no. Growing my hair felt too personal. Changing something that was literally part of me, and over a prolonged period of time. I told her I would not grow my hair, but that I was willing to wear the green taffeta bridesmaid dress. (I thought that was a pretty generous offering.) She said, “I don’t want people pointing at you and laughing while I’m walking down the aisle!” At the time, it occurred to me that the people at her wedding would probably be too busy celebrating her and her soon-to-be-husband to notice me or care what I looked like. I guess in the anxious build up to her wedding, she wasn’t looking at things from that angle. I imagine (though I’ve never been able to confirm this) she just wanted me to slide into the background for once so she could spend this very important occasion with the full attention she deserved. And her worries were not entirely unfounded. On the day of her wedding, ostensibly because of my gender, my mother nearly failed to show up.

When I said I wouldn’t grow my hair out for the wedding, my sister “released” me from bridesmaidhood. I wasn’t intentionally trying to make that happen, but I can’t say I was disappointed. On a visit to New York (I was in college at Princeton, and often took the train to the city to survive the horror of being a visibly queer person in Princeton, New Jersey, in the early 1990s), I went to a very cheap clothing shop, and bought a grey silk suit. (On my father’s credit card. I bought several things on his credit card, without a solid understanding of how he then had to pay it back, and how I left a trail of clues of what I was doing in New York, including buying quite a few hankies and magazines at a leather shop primarily for gay men. I still sometimes feel guilt and shame about this.)

I was relieved and delighted to think, now that I wasn’t a bridesmaid, I could wear a suit to my sister’s wedding. I can’t recall if the suit was really silk. (It cost somewhere around eighty dollars I think). But whatever its makeup, I loved it and I thought it looked quite nice. This was either magical thinking on my part, or a sign of my generally dissociative state of being. When I showed the suit to my mother, she said I could not wear it. Shocking. Well, what really happened was that she said, with an air of finality, that the sleeves were too long. But the meaning was quite clear. I didn’t argue. It was my sister’s wedding, after all. In our final compromise, I wore a skirt and sweater of my mother’s and a pair of “flat” female-type-people shoes. I looked like shit and I felt like shit, but I wore lady clothes, and did my part to be accommodating, which felt like the right thing to do. Still, my mother spent the entire day of my sister’s wedding chasing me around from room to room of the hotel where the wedding was taking place, and where all our relatives were staying, just to tell me once again (and again) what a disappointment I was. At one point she locked herself in her hotel room and phoned rooms aggressively, one after the other, demanding that people find me and send me to see her. People would hold the phone in one hand, pointing to it, giving me one of those “what do I tell her?” looks. And I would shake my head emphatically. Whisper. “I’m not here!”

Soon it was almost time for the wedding. A cousin told me she refused to come out of her room unless I agreed to speak to her. I worried if I didn’t face her, she might “boycott” the wedding. I finally went to her and she told me how disgusting I looked and how mean I was and how uncomfortable I made everyone around me because of the way that I looked and acted. (I suppose I should have expected it. That it shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did.)

And this is how I “ruined” my sister’s wedding. By not managing to be who and what my mother wanted, (even though I made what I thought were reasonable compromises). With my queerness. (And my “selfishness” and “irresponsibility,” etc. etc. —things my sisters would subsequently accuse me of on a regular basis.)

***

Fifteen or so years after my sister’s wedding, in the fall of 2006, a close friend of hers, a family friend, Mindy, was getting married. I had recently moved to New York from Oakland, California, and visited my parents’ house regularly to spend time with my nieces. (Because my sister and I were not on speaking terms, I didn’t get to see my nieces often. Only when we both happened to be at my parents house at the same time.) I visited when Mindy and my sister were preparing for Mindy’s wedding, and despite their unfriendliness, I spent several hours helping them prep. I put together invitations and did some other menial stuff I can no longer recall. Just before the wedding, Mindy sent me an email saying was invited to attend only under the condition that I wore female clothing, something I hadn’t done pretty much since my sister’s wedding more than fifteen years before. I recalled, then, helping out on the morning of my sister’s wedding, a few hours before my mother started chasing me around the hotel—we arrived early to shlep chairs and tables, and my mother was already going off on me about the way I looked and at some point said in a harsh whisper: “Quit with the Victor/Victoria act.”

I’m still trying to work that one out.

In any case, though I visited often to spend time with the family (despite all the many reasons not to), and thought I helped out Mindy with wedding preparation, it in no way gave Mindy or my sister the idea that I should be treated with anything but contempt. I was told I could come to the wedding only in “female clothing.” My parents elaborated on the topic. My dad wanted me to wear the same outfit he’d seen a butch friend of mine wear. She was from a nearby town in Pennsylvania, though we met in the Bay Area. She had come to PA from CA for a family occasion. Randomly, we both happened to be in Allentown at the same time, and she met us for ice cream and she showed us photos from the event. She’d made a “clothing compromise” and went to the event in non-butchlecheit (a Yiddishy way of saying non-butchy) drag. Apparently my father paid very careful attention to her outfit and wanted me to wear the exact same thing to Mindy’s wedding—women’s “capri” pants and flat lady shoes and a women’s blouse. An outfit I wouldn’t be caught dead in. (Literally. I would rather die.) I sent Mindy a note saying that I hoped the wedding was lovely, but I would not be able to attend under those conditions. But I decided to visit Allentown on the wedding weekend so I could spend time with my nieces It was the last time I would see them (aside from one really short and stressful visit in 2012. But more on that later.)

On the morning of Mindy’s wedding, as I had made the fateful choice of being “in town”, my mother got very upset that I wasn’t going to attend. Her eyes teared up. “Please,” she said. “I really want you to be there. There’s no reason for you not to go.”

I said no.

“I have a women’s suit you can wear. I think it will fit you.”

I said no.

I sat at the kitchen table paging through the local newspaper, wiping the newsprint off on my jeans, anxious, fidgety, wondering if this might not be a good time to leave.

My mother, meanwhile, rummaged through her closet and found a navy blue pant-suit and called to me from upstairs. I stood at the bottom of the staircase and looked up at it, queasy. “Just try this,” she said.

I said no. I went up the stairs and tried to explain. “I won’t be comfortable,” I said. “And I’ll still look like me.”

“Just try it,” she said. “Please.”

I caved.

Humiliated, I put on my mother’s suit. When it was on, I stood in front of the mirror in my sister’s childhood bedroom (which had become the room I slept in when I visited.) My mother walked circles around me, assessing if I looked “passably female” enough to go to a wedding I didn’t even want to go to. Who wants to go to a wedding on the condition that they don’t show up as themselves? I don’t know. I didn’t know what people wanted from me or what they expected. That I should put myself in the position of feeling profoundly ill-at-ease to go to the wedding of a person who treats me with disdain? That if I put on a “women’s pant suit” I would suddenly not be trans?

My sister came into the room and started circling me with my mother. In fact, I think my mother called her into the room. My sister has barely spoken to me or looked at me since her wedding in 1992, except to make cutting remarks. Since her wedding, the only time we had a half way civil conversation was strangely also on the day I found out she had been telling her very young kids I was a “bad and mean” person. I found out, because the youngest, maybe four or five years old at the time, came up to me in her charming, curious way and said, “Mom says you’re a bad and mean person, but you don’t seem that way to me.” I was furious. Distraught. Sickened. I was soon to be stuck in a car with my sister for two hours—it was the day of a cousin’s wedding and we were all going to New Jersey in my parents minivan (a wedding I was thankfully invited to wear gender appropriate clothing to).

After my niece said that to me, and I realized what my sister had been doing (no wonder the older niece gave me the same contemptuous looks my sister did, and avoided me as much as possible), I went out and bought razor blades. We drove to Tenafly, New Jersey, and as the highway ribboned out from under us, I did my best to breathe. When everyone was getting ready for my cousin’s wedding I went into the bathroom of the hotel and sat with the blade to my thigh. I made a few scrapes. There was just a thin, barely beading, staccato ribbon of blood. I thought, What if I cut too deep? What if I really hurt myself this time? I was less worried about myself and more worried about other people’s experience of the wedding. (What if I ruined this wedding, too?) But it got me thinking. What was I doing this for? I was in my mid thirties now and had been cutting and burning myself since my early twenties. It had served its purpose. Offered some relief. A unique, if temporary, form of escape from the emotional pain that for so many years had made life feel untenable and endlessly exhausting.

I was alive. I’d somehow made it this far. Wasn’t it time I found another way to cope?

I threw out the blades and went across the street and bought a few giant stuffed cabbages from a deli. I was starving. They weren’t as good as my grandmother’s, but they were definitely delicious.

My father had recently been undergoing radiation treatment for cancer and he was frail, vulnerable, starting to bald, but with long, feathery gray whips of hair—though before his treatments he had one of the thickest crop of hair I’d seen on a sixty year old man. It was painful to see him this way, and I didn’t want to burden him further, but I knew if I didn’t say something to someone, I wouldn’t be able to go to the wedding. I pulled him aside. We went for a walk. I told him what my niece, B., had said. I complained about the way my mother and sister treated me. He did his best to listen. When I was finished pouring my heart out, he shrugged. “I’ll think about it,” was all he had to say. A response that was so very him. And it was never brought up again.

It’s so strange to look back on that day. The horrible morning. The trip to the hardware store. The terrible thrill and nervousness of standing at the check out counter with razor blades. Relief. If I needed it, there it was…The tense drive. The abbreviated run-in with the sharp edge of the blade, then tossed into the trash in a hotel bathroom. The delicious halupkies shared with a family I felt completely alienated from, after which my father did something wonderful. I had borrowed a tuxedo from a friend for the wedding and I didn’t like the bowtie, and said as much. My father, whose was quite a bit nicer, traded with me. I wore his bowtie and he wore mine. It was one of the sweetest moments I’d had with him in my adult life, and on a day that felt near to unbearable. And then we went to the wedding service and I cried as soon as the quartet started playing Pachelbel’s Canon for the couple’s walk down the aisle. People must have thought it was the wedding I was crying over, but it was the potential loss of my delicate, inscrutable father, the whispy strands of hair peeking out from under his kippah.

***

Four years later, I stood in my sister’s old bedroom, wearing my mother’s pants suit, being assessed by two people who care nothing for my comfort or personhood. The same sister who waged a propaganda war against me with her very young children. The same mother who told me on countless occasions that I made her sick, that I was disgusting, that I had basically ruined her life by the mere fact of being myself. They both circled around me like sharks.

“Do you think it looks okay?” my mother asked my sister, it meaning me, or I suppose, the suit. Hard to say.

“You don’t want to know what I think,” my sister said gritting her teeth, so full of contempt—her jaw set with tension in the way it always is when I’m in the room—practically spitting at me. And then, the torrent. She told me exactly what she thought in no uncertain terms: that I looked hideous; that I was a mean and selfish and irresponsible and despicable person.

After fifteen years of giving me disdainful looks or ignoring me altogether except for the occasional glare, after fifteen years of cutting me down—cutting me down when I visited by myself, cutting me down when my girlfriends came with me, cutting me down for having a life of my own, cutting me down for not being a more supportive sibling (?) when all she ever did was push me away and cut me down, cutting me down at my grandmother’s funeral for “showing up” (“for a change”), telling her kids I was a “bad and mean” person, treating me with an unchecked hatred and resentment as she assumed that she knew what kind of “person” I was though she’d never taken the time to try to learn a thing about me—I finally lost my temper. I finally screamed at her. I’m not sure where it came from, but I screamed, “You never loved me!” over and over again and I got up in her face, fists clenched at my sides, a little too close. She shoved me hard into a lamp and as I and the lamp fell backwards toward the floor, I grabbed her arms to break my fall. I left two thumbprint bruises, one on each of her arms (my mother told me this later). Because of that, my sister accused me of physical assault and forbade any contact between me and my nieces. It’s been over ten years.

***

Once, a year or so after Mindy’s wedding, my nieces were at my parents’ house—my parents were watching them for a few days—and I was coming through town briefly. I was hopeful that I would get to see my nieces. I missed them horribly, and I suppose I still hoped there could be some kind of repair. That things could go back at least to the way they were (the younger one and I getting along famously. The older one glaring at me endlessly.) But the older niece called Mindy and told her I was coming, or called my sister who then called Mindy, and Mindy “rescued” my nieces from my parents’ house before I arrived.

Five or six years later, I was dropping my pup off with my parents before going to a conference in L.A. and my younger niece, B., was there. Considering we had been close, the visit was devastating. B. was very withdrawn. Barely interacted with me. She seemed terrified of me. My sister’s propaganda had clearly done its work. Meanwhile I had to deal with the stress of my aging dog, who didn’t like kids, and who had already bitten three people. I was terrified he would bite my niece and that my sister would see it as even more evidence of my monstrosity.

It’s so strange how quickly and easily “monstrosity” is foisted upon those of us who are queer. I’ve often thought it is because we don’t fit into the family narrative—the story they want to tell about themselves. The image they want to project. And, I think, at least in my case because of my differences, I played the role of a “truth teller.” I was not willing to go along with the family’s stories, the ones that tried to blot out any trace of my real experience or my realness. I don’t think this is an uncommon role for a queer person to play. A family trying to force the queerness out, and all the perspective and outsiderness that comes with it. All the stories and all the truths that aren’t welcome. They seem to think that they will benefit by reshaping and revising a person’s tendencies and personhood. Yet, at both my sister’s wedding and Mindy’s, I moved toward compromise, and no one was happy. Both ended in disaster.

I honestly believe that had I gone to the weddings in anything other than a gladiator outfit, no one would have paid much attention to me. Why should they? These occasions were other people’s celebrations. Maybe a few people would have wondered about me for a moment and then moved on.

Had I found a way to look “more female” (?) would it really have brought my sister, my parents, or Mindy true happiness? Doubtful. Do we really have the power to ruin people’s lives with our gender? Or fix people’s lives with our gender? My guess is that if someone thinks we’re making them miserable because of our transness, they were miserable to begin with.

***

Things That Might Be Going on When People Ask Me or Other Non-Cis Folks to Dress and Behave in a Way That Is Antithetical to Our Core Identity

1) Someone wants to be the center of attention and worries our queerness is going to undermine that.

2) Someone wants us, as a wedding gift to them, to be someone they wish we were.

3) Someone thinks many problems (i.e. family issues) would be solved if we would just look, act, and behave “appropriately.”

4) Someone thinks their definition of “appropriately” is more appropriate than ours because they know how to conform to social norms, such as believing that gender is dichotomous.

5) Someone has witnessed us dressed in what they see as “gender appropriate” clothing before, in childhood, perhaps, or somewhere, some time, and they think we were passing well-enough then at whatever gender they would like us to pass as, and they don’t understand why things can’t just go back to the way they were when we did that or were doing that. (I think it might be impossible for some people to understand the intense suffering some of us experience when forced to conform to or present in the way of a gender identity antithetical to who we are.)

6) Someone has seen or heard of another queer person who made an exception and offered to conform to their family’s request around presentation, and so they think we ought to, too.

7) Someone thinks that it would be easy for us to change who and what we are and what we look like, that our queerness is simply a matter of a few articles of clothing, or an easily brushed aside act of rebellion—perhaps even that we are queer to get revenge on them. Because, after all, it’s all about them.

8) Someone loves us, accepts us in their way, but fears our visible queerness might unleash great drama that they wish to avoid. They think it is our job to placate others by hiding ourselves.

My takeaway from the fact that even after I tried to compromise, no one was happy: No matter what I do aside from abdicating my selfhood, some people are never going to be able to tolerate my being.

***

Recently, after forty odd years of struggles with my parents around my gender, during which my parents did and said a lot of really cruel and unkind things (my mother crying every time she looked at me for years and years, telling me it made her physically sick to look at me, that I was literally making her sick, likely killing her. Then, when I asked my parents to refrain from using pronouns as much as possible—rather than asking them to use my correct pronouns—they doubled down in their use of female language. Calling me “little miss” such and such and other absurdities. My parents telling me, after they found out I was taking T, that they didn’t want to see me, and my mother telling me she couldn’t “be nice to me” because she didn’t think I was “really trans.” Insisting that she knows who I am and I don’t. That somehow, after living openly as a transgender person for twenty plus years, I am still deluded about my own identity)…they started using my correct pronouns and name. There was no apology. No acknowledgement of past hardship or behavior. Our relationship remains fragile, troubled and complicated in many ways. But I’m grateful that they’ve made this shift and my mother no longer cries every time she looks at me. She no longer tries to change me. And we manage, in our small ways, to stay connected.

I still don’t speak to my sister. We haven’t had any contact since Mindy’s wedding, except she wrote me one small Facebook message a few years ago after my parents told her I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalopathy (CFS/ME), to say she was sorry to hear I was sick. That’s all she said. She didn’t invite me to contact her. She didn’t ask any questions. For a few months I worried over what, if anything, to do. Whether or how to respond. I decided that since it wasn’t a clear invitation to connect, I should move forward and let it go. After twenty plus years of her being verbally abusive and cruel, and after making no amends around this abuse or around cutting me off from my nieces, that little “olive branch” or whatever it was (I really have no idea) was far from comforting. I’m not willing to be in contact with people (aside from my parents) with long histories of cruelty if they don’t at the very least acknowledge their past behavior and clearly state their intention for doing things differently.

I haven’t seen or heard from my nieces. I imagine they are somewhere imagining that I am somehow monstrous. What else am I to believe? I try to convince myself that I am not. Or, that if I am, I am more Sully from Monsters Inc than Voldemort.

Recently I posted something on Facebook about the fact that I saw (by accident—we are not Facebook friends but we both happened to wish Mindy’s brother Brett a happy birthday and I saw her profile image) that my sister had a rainbow “love comes in all shapes and sizes” type image on her profile pic. I was sickened by it. I posted about it in a non-specific way and asked people for (snarky) memes, basically to help me process the information—laugh a bit, and feel supported. Most people offered lovely, funny, supportive responses. However, a few people who barely know me, tried to give me advice about forgiveness. How I should forgive whoever this person was and move on. One person seemed to think I had no idea that “families are complicated” (and that therefore, I should “forgive and forget”). Another person said that my sister’s rainbow flag profile photo (I didn’t say it was my sister, just that “someone” who had “tormented me for decades because of my queerness” had posted a queer rainbow flag on her profile pic) might be her way of apologizing to me and therefore I should be grateful. As if decades of dehumanization should be erased with a Facebook profile picture posted by someone I am not on Facebook with just so this Facebook friend who I barely know doesn’t have to deal with their discomfort at my having feelings. (And he’s a trauma therapist!)

It was unpleasant, to say the least, these “Facebook fixers.” People who feel the need to challenge the experience of people whose feelings about something they don’t approve of or want to hear about. Do they have any idea what I’ve been through? Do they know the work I’ve done for my entire adult life to survive the legacy of my sister’s disdain and my mother’s abuse, and to show up as best I can for my daily life? For my other relationships. For my relationship with my parents, even though they’ve never apologized for anything, never acknowledged any of their past harms, and have never been willing to do any work themselves. (In over twenty-five years of being openly transgender, my parents have never asked me one question about my experiences or identity and have never tried to understand. Really, they’ve wanted to know very little of my experiences in the world, but they do, I think, want to gloss over the profound fractures between us so as to appear like a “normal” family. One which, at the very least, is in minimal contact. They are not emotionally available, to say the least, but they have always been supportive in the ways they are able to be. They have financially supported me whenever they can, and this has been profoundly meaningful, potentially life-saving. They have, when we are comfortable enough with each other to have a laugh, wonderful senses of humor. They make me laugh. I love them, and am grateful for their support, but that doesn’t make our relationship easy, or erase a long and troubling history.)

When people on Facebook, and acquaintances in general, try to brush off or diminish my experiences in some way, at times I find myself overcome with a kind of primal agony of being misunderstood. What do these “fixers,” these “brushers off” know about me? If they think I need to hear their opinions on my life: “it’s not so bad” “they didn’t mean it” “I’m sure they meant well” “all families are complicated” “stay positive” “everything happens for a reason” “look on the bright side”—why don’t they at least ask me a few contextualizing questions? They know nothing of the day of Mindy’s wedding, the day my sister cut me down one last time, pushed me, screamed at me to “get the fuck out of” my parents’ house, told me, “you’re not welcome here anymore”; they know nothing of how it felt to pack my things and walk to the front door, my mother weeping on the stairs, telling me quietly “you know you don’t have to leave,” but of course I had to leave, and for the first time in my life, I heard her use an I statement—she didn’t tell me it made her physically sick to look at me, or yell at my friends “how can you stand to look at [him]?!” or say that because of me she didn’t even know why she bothered getting up in the morning, (why she bothered living), or tell me that I was literally killing her—that she had heart palpitations because of me and her doctor said she could die from them. She didn’t say any of those things. She just said (after so many years of awfulness), “I don’t know how to deal with your gender.” And I said, “Maybe you could get some support.” And then I left with my mother crying on the stairs and my nieces freaked out and my sister convinced that she had been right to say and do all the things she ever did, right to declare me a mean and bad and selfish and irresponsible person who wasn’t welcome in my parents’ house, because after years and years of her cutting me down, I finally snapped and raised my voice, which she saw as confirmation of all of her ideas about me. Isn’t it funny how this kind of insidious storytelling works….What do these “wise acquaintances” know of what it felt like to drive back to New York that day, with a hollowness and pain pressing against my forehead, shattering my already fragile ecosystem of stability; how I drove to an empty beach—it was early fall, the waters were rough-angry—and watched the waves grapple with their own existential unease. I considered getting in and letting the currents take me to another place entirely? “But there was a breeze blowing, a choppy, stiff wind that whipped the water into froth…She turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude, which the vast expanse of water, meeting and melting with the moonlit sky, conveyed to her excited fancy. As she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself.” (Chopin)

What do they know of the strangeness of leaving the water behind. Of going home but feeling a hollowed out feeling that there is no such thing as home. And each day after that, hearing my sister’s words, knowing she simmers with a kind of bitterness that won’t stop seeping into my life—that she would tell and continue telling my nieces I was a monster, and I had to sit with that, knowing that propaganda works and it is poisonous and I might never have a way to right that wrong?

What do they know about going days and months and years cut off from people I love deeply, how before that day I did my best to build a connection with my nieces despite being queer, despite the way my family treated me? How, not long before the day of Mindy’s wedding, B., the niece I was close to, said to me, in a small and quiet voice, when we were hanging out in my sister’s bedroom where I was staying at the time, and I was reading Harry Potter in Spanish and she was translating all the spells for me because she’d read the books over and over again and knew the spells by heart, how she said that I seemed like a boy to her. And I wanted to tell her, yes, that is because I am, because I am transgender and I am queer, and that that is okay—because I wanted to be authentic, and also because I thought she might be queer herself.

But instead I just shrugged and brushed off her question and changed the subject, and I never got to tell her that it was okay to be queer and it was okay to be different and that whoever she was, I would love her.

***

I’ve been thinking about monstrosity, that it is not the evil part of a body, but the tenderest, most vulnerable place, an awareness of the tenuousness of any small sense of belonging. To be truly known, to feel truly at home, in the self, and in the world, takes a great effort, and a great bravery and grace, that not all of us have access to, and even still, if it comes, the feeling only appears in scattered moments, the perfect little breezes of spring that are here and gone, sandwiched among the chill of winter and the cloying sizzle of summer. And these small moments of true integration, of feeling held in some way by the world, are often offset by the understanding of their transience and of the vastness of time. Vertiginous.

But it’s nearly March now, and every evening the light stays a little longer, like a friend who lingers, who doesn’t want to leave. And today spring is in the air, the squirrels are squirreling and all the snow is melting.

I don’t know if I’ll ever see my nieces again, and I try not to dwell on it.

If I do hear from them some day, I have no idea what it will feel like. What they’ll want to share with me or know of me. What we could and might be to each other after all this time.

I don’t know if I’ll ever see my sister again, or speak to her. The last time we were in the same place at the same time was at my uncle’s funeral four years ago, and she avoided me. She left soon after I arrived (I got stuck in traffic and was a little late) without acknowledging me except, I suppose, by her avoidance.

If others choose to create stories about me and my life and my choices and motivations without taking the time to know me, there is nothing I can do, but let the breeze ruffle my fur, growl here and there when I need to and let the chips fall where they may. Bask in the glory of loved ones in my life who can love me as I am…snout and all.

prey is a themed full-length poetry collection centered around navigating a culture of predation. It details various predatory relationships from childhood onward, drawing parallels between human and nonhuman predators. The book seeks to expose the depth of trauma caused by physical, psychological, and sexual abuse—exploring what it is to become prey.

These poems are both vulnerable and vicious, no one is off the hook. Threaded throughout the book is a series of poems with a variation on the title, “Secret Written from inside a [Predator’s] Mouth” (sharks, snakes, grizzlies, lions, falcons, and more). In this series, I directly compare human and nonhuman predators, revealing the often complicated secrets between predator and prey. In another series, I chronicle the escalation of a relationship with a sociopath using magic realism (and magic) to expose the psychological torture of gaslighting and emotional abuse.

Certain predators make repeat appearances and, at intervals, the book cites known predators from both legal and news sources, each under the title, “His Version.” The final of these is a persona/found poem I wrote in the voice of the last person who assaulted me, culled from his various communications. While I was loathe to give voice to these men in some respects, I also believe that placing the texts side-by-side serves as a powerful tool to illuminate the myriad ways predators gaslight victims and society alike.

I was overjoyed to learn that the manuscript was selected by Aafa Weaver as first-runner up for the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, and then to contract with Black Lawrence Press for publication. The team at BLP have provided a warm, supportive, and generous home for this vulnerable work. I am grateful. The book will be released in August, but it’s available for preorder now.

Why did you write prey?

I did not set out to write this book. It demanded to be written.

I have survived numerous forms of abuse over the course of my life: multiple sexual assaults, intimate partner violence and domestic abuse—including one partner who attempted to take my life, and a childhood dictated by alcoholism and periodic physical violence.

The most recent sexual assault in 2010 served as an unexpected tipping point—the mind’s final fracture. Soon after, I was diagnosed with PTSD and have struggled with severe social anxiety, panic, and hypervigilance ever since.

I started writing poems, as I have long done, to intellectually process the trauma of that assault and the public backlash and community furor that ensued. I had soon drafted a chapbook-length collection and thought to be done with it. However, in the creation process, other survivals from my own history began to resurface and I realized that I was evading something much, much larger.

Between my own history, the powerful mirror of other survivors’ stories, and the continued reveal of predator after predator from within my own writing community, I knew I was not done. More work was demanded. More risk. More vulnerability.

So I kept on. Sitting with, facing, unpacking, and writing out a lifetime of predatory experiences. prey is a book, I’ve discovered, that I can keep writing toward without ever being “done.” Indeed, I will likely keep writing toward these traumas for the rest of my days (as one does). But this collection, here, as it stands, is a testament to the will of the survivor. To the keepers of tortured bodies who struggle ever-forward, continually resurrecting. This work is deeply connected to the women to whom I first broke my toxic silence, serving also as a testament to the healing power of community and sisterhood and chosen family. Finally, this book is a testament to the nature of story itself: how necessary our voices, how crucial for each of us alive—as I have said elsewhere—to face it, name it, and write it.

Of all the animals featured in prey, which are you?

Over the course of the book, I become raven, grizzly, crocodile, chicken, coyote, vulture, calf, even the fabled jackalope…and more. I am, though, always, ever, a woman.

prey sounds damn heavy. Is there any fun in the book?

Being preyed upon is the antithesis of fun, so, no. However, there are tones of sarcasm and biting wit peppered throughout many of these poems. Folks who like-mindedly abhor the calculated, intentional predation of others will find this book has a lot to celebrate. Survival is, after all, survival.

What frightens you about prey?

Its predators. And, I must say, their apologists. Behind these tellings are real people who have done real harm. From gaslighting to stalking to rape to murder. It is mind-boggling some days to know that this book exposes them—and me—and that I am still here, with my head squarely on my shoulders, singing it. Like the little goat in Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poem, “Song,” Broken Thorn Sweet Blackberry—to whom this book is dedicated—who sang and sang to haunt his tormentors.

Your cover is stunning. What was the process?

As I came more clear about the shape of the book and the shape of my own traumas, I knew I wanted the cover art to be a woman’s head mounted on a plaque like an elk—taxidermied. I turned to the internet, exhaustively searching for anything resembling what wildness was developing in my imagination.

Somewhere in my search, I discovered artist Natalie Shau’s piece, “Hunter’s Dream” (an image of a woman with a deer head, struck in the chest by a hunter’s arrows), which was certainly in the vein of prey. I researched more of Natalie’s work online and discovered “Doe Deer” (the mounted upper torso and head of a woman with antlers). That was the right idea—but the 18th century French-style wig invoked (for me) more of a commentary on European history, which I felt would cloud prey. I was greedy for something custom.

Still, after devouring Natalie’s entire body of work available online, I knew—without question—she was the artist I wanted to create the cover for prey. So, I reached out by email and crossed my fingers. She replied right away, more than open to creating a commissioned piece for the book cover. We worked over several iterations, finalizing the artwork much more quickly than anticipated. I asked if she might be flexible in how her artwork appeared in final layout on the cover and again, she was unbelievably accommodating.

Then it sat—a secret between us—for more than a year. Once Black Lawrence Press was ready to start working on the cover layout, designer Amy Freels gave my requests gracious attention. I was offered three initial layouts and asked only for slight tweaks to finalize my favorite one. And I am absolutely in love.

When the elephant died, what did you do with its bones?

I strung them together as a marionette and mounted it on my living room wall.

The Nervous Breakdown selected your poem, “How Women Begot the Bible,” from prey to feature with this interview. Give us the juice on this poem.

In its heart, this poem is a parable. A simple warning of what will come should an abuser continue abusing. It’s one of the few humorous poems in the collection. A wry, cheeky piece about a woman invoking her lineage of bold, sharp-edged women who, when pushed too far, burn it all down—leaving their abusers reeling.

The core lesson (don’t abuse lest you get torched and left in the ash) is couched in a broader, saucier jab at patriarchy, inferring that those who dreamed up the bible must’ve been stewing in the bitter aftermath known as “consequences” with little more than a heckuva story to tell.

Where do you go from here? What is next—and where can we find it?

My latest project is a nonfiction/multi-genre manuscript detailing the story of a young man I knew as a teen who attempted to kill me and then stalked me for a decade. He is a recurring character throughout my body of work, including several poems in prey, but this account is a more prosaic, detailed examination of the most terrifying man I’ve ever known.

I’m never far from poems, though, so stay tuned here and here to keep up with new work. And thank you for reading!

Let’s close with some rapid-fire fun facts.

What is your least favorite word?

Obligation.

What are the latest books on your shelf right now, already started or waiting to be read?

Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Ottessa Moshfegh. Her new novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, is available from Penguin Press. Her previous novel, Eileen, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Sign up now to receive your copy! (Sign-up deadline for this title: July 15, 2018.)

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Circa is a dark comedy featuring Henry Colmes, a high school sophomore trying to find his place in school and life. In alternating chapters, it is also the story of Henry as a thirty-something cub reporter trying to track down an elusive cult leader in order to interview him for the man’s own obituary.

Alluding to the timelessness of tragedy, Circaoffers an examination of our collective desperation for meaningful context in which to place and rationalize the actions we take.

At once heartfelt, tragic, and surreal, Circa, the debut novel from author Adam Greenfield, looks at the pivotal moments in a person’s life that lead them to make the decisions they can never take back and, ultimately, never forget.

]]>http://thenervousbreakdown.com/admin/2018/07/august-circa-by-adam-greenfield/feed/0July Book Club: The Dying of the Light, by Robert Goolrickhttp://thenervousbreakdown.com/admin/2018/07/july-book-club-the-dying-of-the-light-by-robert-goolrick/
http://thenervousbreakdown.com/admin/2018/07/july-book-club-the-dying-of-the-light-by-robert-goolrick/#commentsThu, 05 Jul 2018 16:52:09 +0000http://thenervousbreakdown.com/?p=129611This month, the TNB Book Club is reading The Dying of the Light, the excellent new novel by Robert Goolrick, bestselling author of A Reliable Wife, Heading Out to Wonderful, and The Fall of Princes. Stay tuned for Robert’s appearance on the Otherppl with Brad Listi podcast later this month. Enjoy!
]]>http://thenervousbreakdown.com/admin/2018/07/july-book-club-the-dying-of-the-light-by-robert-goolrick/feed/1Episode 531 — Bethany C. Morrowhttp://thenervousbreakdown.com/admin/2018/07/episode-531-bethany-c-morrow/
http://thenervousbreakdown.com/admin/2018/07/episode-531-bethany-c-morrow/#respondWed, 04 Jul 2018 05:08:33 +0000http://thenervousbreakdown.com/?p=129605

A month after the shooting, I held a yard sale. Out with the self-help books, the roller skates, the painting of the fortune-telling cat. Have to make enough money to get out of Orlando.

A pink woman crisscrossed my lawn, a Margaritaville visor shielding her broad face from the sun as she connected the dots: The Judy Garland vinyl, the stack of old Vogues, me in my denim cutoffs sipping a mimosa at 9AM. She tilted her head my way, and maybe in that moment put it all together. He’s gay. He’s available. He must have something to say about Pulse.

Was I friends with anyone who was murdered that night, the visor was curious. I smiled so I wouldn’t lose her. It was too early to talk about dead bodies, however, was she interested in a drink or perhaps a gently-used cocktail shaker I can’t figure out how to open, though I’m sure if you just run it under hot water…

She was proud of me, she said.

So no to the shaker?

Proud of us.

I had to make enough money to get out of Orlando.

Pulse, the bar with the watered down drinks and the impossible parking and the annoying chain-mail curtain you had to push through to enter, was gone. People like us were wanted gone.

So what was it that she was proud of? That I didn’t die? Or that I found a way to keep living? I know what she wanted, it’s what everyone wanted when they gave me their sad looks.

Tell me about it you poor, poor boy.

I sold her my old trashcan, chipped at the corners. Five bucks to behold my grief.

I’ll tell you what I didn’t tell her. That for those first few weeks, I wanted to cry at every gas station. I wanted to cry at Target. I wanted to get buzzed all night and sway my hips under a disco ball at any other Orlando gay bar. To feel the hug of hundreds of shirtless gay men dancing around me, all of us wondering whether this place would be taken away too, but at least for six minutes of a Lady Gaga mix we knew where our friends were. And after the bartender would slip my fat bill across the counter, I wanted to drive somewhere else, somewhere with cheaper drinks, somewhere open later hours. I remember, driving between bars in the early morning, how I would often look at the people passing me in their cars, daunted by their certainty that wherever they had set out to go would be there when they arrived. How did they do that? How were they so sure that they were safe?

A drag queen told me she forgot what it was like to be comfortable. My best friend started carrying a knife. We promised each other that we would not allow the fear of another attack keep us inside. We have to keep going out, we said, convincing ourselves that the nights we spent blacking out were courageous. We can’t let them scare us into hiding.

We would not be another sad story, another lesson on resilience sandwiched between The Planet is Melting and Will There Be Any Rhinos Left for Our Kids? Fuck the planet, we drank. Fuck the rhinos, another round. What about us? What about saving us?

I’ll tell you how one morning, days before the yard sale, I woke up drenched in vomit and curled up in the backseat of my car. I laughed and I cried and I knew that there was nothing else. No one would stop me from killing myself this way.

I threw myself into the fantasy of a new place, somewhere as far away from Florida while still basically being Florida. I was delighted most of all by California’s tourism commercials. Kim Kardashian brushing up on quantum physics by the pool! Betty White zipping around a film set on a golf cart! I’ve always been a sucker for ads. People tell me to do something and I do it. California asked me to come and I booked my flight.

I made all sorts of wild plans for the new west coast things I would get into. My life was going to be like a Nancy Meyers movie: I would spend my days tending to my succulent garden, drinking kombucha from a mason jar. I would roll up my all-white, crisp, linen pants and dip my toes into the Pacific Ocean. I would have moments of enlightenment, maybe once a day if I wasn’t busy, when I would look back at my life in Orlando and come to understand that Pulse was just a drop in a vast sea, there would be other places, more good to come. All that was before, the tragic set-up to this gentle ever-after.

In those early days in California, with no car to drive to the beach in and little money for artisanal probiotics, I spent most of my time lying on my mattress on the floor playing old episodes of RuPaul’s podcast, What’s the Tee? RuPaul was the one connection that I kept to the past. I wanted to start new, to take a hiatus from Orlando and from drinking, but him, I would keep. He was safe.

What did RuPaul talk about? Diana Ross. Kids these days. Tribes.

I don’t think he ever actually said the words, You must find your tribe, but I still took the order as seriously as if he did. The way he spoke of them, he made it clear that everyone had one, and if you didn’t, or if you’d lost yours, you’d better find one quick. To not belong to a tribe meant you were floating directionless through space. The bad kind. Space as in we need some. You are living in the nothingness between people, in the absence of relationships. I was in California, where no one knew I was a poor, poor boy. No one wondered if I knew anyone dead. I, finally, was no wonder.

RuPaul was my temporary tribe. He was a queer voice I could download and carry around with me while I explored my new zip code, Riverside, an hour and a half east of Los Angeles.

The summer I arrived, I thought that Riverside looked like a Bob Ross painting. Not one of his finished, pastoral scenes with soft names that sound like Yankee Candle scents—not The Old Mill, not Light House At Night—rather when he’s just getting started and guides his television audience to take a slop of color from their palettes and smudge it on their canvases, leaving them scratching their heads wondering how they’re ever going to fix this shit-stained mess.

Maybe it wasn’t that bad, but I had a vendetta.

A month after moving, I discovered that Riverside was ranked the country’s third most homophobic city, based on a study that analyzed the frequency of derogatory tweets. A friend suggested that maybe there was just one really homophobic guy tweeting die faggots a thousand times a day skewing the study, but I knew all-too-well what one really homophobic person was capable of.

The city hated gay people. The nerve of it! After I’d stuffed my life into two suitcases to avoid living in a place that was now famous for exactly that, so I hated it right back. I would hate Riverside more than it hated me. I would find other gay people to hate it with me, and we would form a gang of haters. We would wear matching leather chaps and studded belts.

Starting a gay gang is hard when you’ve moved thousands of miles away from everyone you know. Desperate to meet queer folk, I lined up a series of dates on Grindr. The idea was to friend-zone myself. If I could go on dates and be semi-likeable, though not enough that anyone would want to actually explore a romantic relationship with me, I could convince some of these guys to be my friend, and maybe they would introduce me to their friends, and I could ask them all to join my gang, be my tribe. I was getting my Nancy Meyers fantasy back on track. I was ready to lock down my role as the quirky, though ultimately unlovable, best friend. I bought glasses and everything. I knew I was being devious, but there aren’t many places to meet other queer people organically in a small city, and I figured no one on Grindr was looking for a serious enough relationship to be genuinely disappointed by my low-stakes con.

On my first attempt, I took a man named Cruz to dinner at a Mexican restaurant. Inside, red Chinese lanterns hanging from the ceiling washed the place in a warm, rusty hue. A drowsy-looking machine spun frozen tamarindo margaritas behind the register next to a portrait of The Virgin Mary. Cruz was exactly one inch taller than me and had a small patch of white hair on his left sideburn. It was such a quaint defect, something that would make me put my hands to my chest and say aw if he were a cat at a shelter. I concentrated all of my energy on beaming the command “You are going to be my best friend” into his forehead. From his perspective, I must have looked like someone staring directly into the sun.

RuPaul’s Drag Race is a common denominator among all gay people, so halfway through the date I asked him who he was rooting for this season. He leaned in and eyed the tables around us as if he suspected we were being followed by the Secret Gay Police.

“To be honest, I don’t like that show,” he whispered.

“Oh,” is what I said. I suspected there were gay people out there who didn’t care about Drag Race, but I assumed it was only a matter of not having seen it. The same feeling struck me as when a friend once told me that she didn’t “like” sunblock. This was simply not an option. You will wear sunblock. You will eat your vegetables. And if you are gay, you will like Drag Race.

“Drag queens are like, not even talented,” was his reason. So the white patch of hair had been a trick to convince me that he was a good person, a perfectly adoptable best friend. If he had initially seemed endearing, upon closer inspection I noticed a small pile of bloody hairballs in the corner of his cage, a shelter employee reassuring me that it was probably just a cold instead of what it really was: a sign of something nefarious lurking within him.

And why the hell were there Chinese lanterns at this Mexican restaurant?

Not liking drag is one thing, but to not think drag queens are talented baffles me. One of the most compelling things about RuPaul’s Drag Race is that it’s an amalgam of every hit reality television show of the last two decades. Contestants are asked to sew their own costumes (Project Runway), sing (American Idol), write stand-up routines (Last Comic Standing), model (America’s Next Top Model), do their own special effects makeup (Face Off), and display a slew of other skills that have yet to be exploited elsewhere on prime time. Cheerleading. Giving dwarves make-overs. Tucking their penises and scrotums into their anuses. I wanted to ask him to shove his dick and balls into his butthole, leave them there for six hours, and then tell me drag is not a talent, but like an annoying kid pestering his parents to explain the petroleum jelly on the nightstand, I instead followed up with, “But why?”

He smirked. “I don’t really like gay guys.”

It’s possible he thought we were on a heterosexual date. Maybe if I had let him come on my chest later, the jizz would have magically assembled into the words “No homo.”

But we’re supposed to be your tribe, I wanted to say. It hadn’t been six months since Pulse. Already? I wanted to scream. Already you can hate us?

“Well, obviously I don’t hate all gay guys,” he corrected himself. “Just the femme ones. So dramatic, you know?”

And so it was no wonder that Riverside was the third most homophobic city in the country. When my next date referred to the lesbian bartender as a “dumb dyke” for not laughing at his dog rape joke, I knew I had to do something, fast, because I was beginning to see the sense in agoraphobia. Why should I go outside, where it was so hot that my cellphone would often stop working in my hands? Why should I bother with Riverside, where in 2002 the local gay bar was the site of a hate crime involving a gang of skinheads who stabbed and killed a gay man and injured another, saying, “You want some trouble… fag, here it is!” Even fifteen years later there was a cracked mirror on the dancefloor that led to what looked suspiciously like a bullet hole. And look, even the gay people hated gay people, hated the women who were dumb dykes, the men who were too feminine, too gay.

I shut myself in my room, miserable. Moving to California hadn’t magically fixed anything. I was more alone than ever. I turned to Drag Race, a show where there is no such thing as too gay. The gang was a dumb idea. My Nancy Meyers movie needed a re-write. One night, I typed RuPaul’s name into YouTube and watched him speak for hours, hypnotized by his ability to articulate everything that was keeping my new address from feeling like a home.

“Finding your tribe, finding your constituency and your comrades—that’s what this event is all about,” he declared at his inaugural Drag Con, the annual drag queen convention that draws tens of thousands of drag devotees to the Los Angeles Convention Center to worship at the altar of RuPaul. It was as close to a gay Mecca as you can get.

That’s it! I thought. That’s where I’ll find people like me.

I would make friends, and we would not be tragic or sad. We would be drag. Glitter and big hair and so many Cher medleys. There would be life after love, dammit.

At later conventions, and in other interviews I watched that night—RuPaul on The Oprah Show, making the rounds on all the late night talk shows, tearing up on Entertainment Tonight moments after accepting his Emmy—he went on to speak, obviously, about The Matrix.

Because RuPaul loves The Matrix, the 1999 sci-fi thriller about a computer hacker named Neo who awakens one day to discover that his entire life is an illusion. The Matrix is his I Ching, his life manual, as foundational to his drag philosophy as mascara and duct tape. RuPaul frequently says that the way people expect you to dress and talk and play by their rules is all a game. You don’t have to play their game. You can make your own rules. But first, like Neo, you have to wake up.

If he’d been barefoot with a beard in any of these interviews, I would have dismissed his ideas as the ramblings of a cult leader. But he always wore the impeccable, tailored suit of a waiter at an intimidating fancy restaurant, so I believed everything he said implicitly. The veal pairs well with a full-bodied Zinfandel? Naturally. The world is like The Matrix and humans are all sleeping drones being controlled by higher powers who manipulate our happiness by limiting how we express our gender, sexuality, race, and class? Well, duh!

Many queer people have known this since they first realized that liking who they like is wrong. There are rules, and you are breaking them. I didn’t think there was a vast underworld of Matrix people being mined by robots for their life force. But I know how it feels to not have control of my body. I know what it’s like to deplete an essential part of myself in public to avoid standing out, to have to mask my queerness at auto shops to avoid getting ripped off, to have to calculate the odds of getting gay bashed while walking to the grocery store at night for a gallon of milk, to not be able to make it through a movie without thinking, What if it happens again? Here. And he starts with you.

RuPaul’s philosophy reminded me of a line by Rilke from the poem Archaic Torso of Apollo. After describing a bust of the god Apollo with lush phrases like “eyes like ripening fruit” and stone that “glisten[s] like a wild beast’s fur,” Rilke ends the poem with what feels like an off-topic declaration: “You must change your life.” I always liked the abruptness of that line. It was as if he had been in a trance staring at the marble Apollo and had the epiphany, Oh yeah, this isn’t real. Move along, bub.

When I landed in California, the world felt unreal, too. Pulse was a crime scene, and evidence suggested the murderer was one of us. A reality star had been elected president with a running mate that supported conversion therapy and they were both being backed by neo-Nazis. Skinheads lived in my city. Gay people were being rounded up and sent to death camps in Chechnya. Years of being cautioned that at any moment someone might try to hurt me for being gay and Latino have made me irrational and narcissistic. I believed the paranoid voice inside that told me I was next. Among so much chaos, RuPaul’s words felt all-too sane.

And so I listened to him and thought: Snap out of it. Wake up.

You have to move along. You must find your tribe.

Two months after watching his speech, I rented a car and drove an hour and a half to Los Angeles for Drag Con.

I took a seat in a crowded auditorium next to two middle-aged women. We were early at the convention, eager for the first of the day’s scheduled drag panels. Elaine wore blue lipstick that clashed against her pale white skin, giving her the appearance of a drowning victim. Her friend, Pam, was dressed unusually casual for the crowd—jeans and a t-shirt—which only had the effect of making her stand out at Drag Con. As I inspected the pair, I felt like the orphaned baby bird searching for its family in the children’s book Are You My Mother?

Are you my tribe?

Generously, Elaine asked, “So, do you like Drag Race?”

I made a note to stop glaring at people like they’re the sun.

“I love it,” I told her. Elaine beamed.

“So do we,” she wrapped her arm around Pam, then leaned her head on her friend. “She hasn’t been herself lately. Have you, Pam?”

I looked around the auditorium. I wasn’t sure if this observation was meant for me. After all, I’d only met Pam a second earlier. Elaine could have told me that Pam had just escaped a women’s prison in Taiwan where she’d been locked up for smuggling ayahuasca through a slit in her armpit, and I would have smiled politely and asked if she’d made any friends.

Pam was equally caught off guard by the revelation. “Guess I haven’t,” she said, gently peeling Elaine off her chest.

I reached into my book bag and pulled out a pot gummy bear. Ever since I got to Riverside, I’d gotten into the habit of popping them like Baby Aspirin. I was weening myself off alcohol with drugs. Progress.

“Breakup,” Elaine explained. She took my uncomfortable nod as a cue to tell me more.

After twelve years of marriage, Pam had found condoms in her husband’s jeans. This wouldn’t have been strange, except she was on the pill. They didn’t use condoms. Devastated, she called Elaine for support. Come to California, Elaine said. Kim K. by the pool! Betty White and all that! With her friend’s encouragement, Pam booked a flight from Portland to California. She planned on confronting her husband but wanted to take some time to clear her head first. Elaine thought a makeover and going to Drag Con might cheer her up.

So, yes, Pam hadn’t been feeling herself lately. Her husband was almost definitely cheating on her and her best friend thought the solution would be to get a perm.

“Who do you want to win?” I asked, trying to switch to more pleasant conversation. Maybe we could talk about politics or Chechnyan gay death camps. I swallowed another gummy.

“Valentina,” answered Pam, no need to think it through.

Valentina was the front runner of the current season of Drag Race. I imagine Pam in bed late at night watching her most popular performance on YouTube. In the video, she wears a silk, white gown with orchids in her hair, lip-synching to Isabel Pantoja’s “Asi Fue” at a packed bar. It’s a sad song, about a woman who has fallen in love with another man after her lover disappears without warning. The singer resents him for leaving and expecting her to still love him upon his return, as if her life was supposed to halt while he was away. She’s sorry, she croons, but her hands are tied. What does he want from her? In contrast to the lyrics, everyone watching her is thrilled, their faces rapt. Valentina makes the singer’s heartache seem almost glamorous. And yet, you can’t help but wonder about the gay man underneath the makeup, what it took for him to get on stage. I mean this literally. Drag is painful. Aside from the tucking, there’s corsetry digging into your ribs, wig-tape pulling at your skull, feet stuffed and forced into unnatural angles. You wonder at the work it took him to channel Isabel Pantoja, to look like someone who has moved on.

“And who are you rooting for?” Pam asked.

Before I got the chance to answer, a drag queen in a white latex jumpsuit appeared in front of us. She held the hand of an Asian girl who peeked at me from behind a fan with the word “Shade” printed on it in gold.

“Biiitch,” the drag queen started, eyes widening at the empty seats next to me. “Those taken?”

I told her no, and the pair shuffled in sideways.

“You’re here alone?” Elaine asked. She looked thrown.

Yes.

“I thought… So, you’re not waiting for friends?”

Not.

“Oh.”

Oh. Without a tribe, I was defective. I could see them retreating: Who’s this kid who came here by himself? What did he do to not have anyone? Where are his people? Why is he eating so much candy?

The room fell into a reverent hush.

Katya and Trixie Mattel, two of the show’s most beloved former contestants and the hosts of the panel, took a seat on stage. Trixie immediately launched into her impression of RuPaul’s endless corporate sponsorships: “So I want to talk to you guys about Square Space. I was updating my Square Space under my Boll and Branch sheets on my Casper mattress, waiting for my audiobook from Audibook.com and my delivery from Blue Apron…”

The audience roared. She was spot on. There were times when the show felt more like an infomercial than, as RuPaul has put it, “a place to showcase the indomitability of the human spirit,” whatever that means.

In a few days, Pam would be flying alone back to Portland. In a few hours, I would be driving alone back to Riverside. If not a tribe—which I was gradually realizing was ridiculous, to really think I could find a family in a day, worse, in a couple of hours—then what would I leave with? What was the point? I loved RuPaul, but did he really think I could find a tribe here, or was he just trying to sell me a t-shirt? I popped another gummy.

I lost Pam and Elaine in the chaos that ensued when the panel ended and hundreds of people attempted to leave through the room’s two rear doors. As I exited the auditorium, shaking, unsteady, I realized, Oh my god, you are the most stoned anyone has ever been.

Which is how, ten minutes later, I found myself blinking back tears as I stared at a bunch of mannequins strung up from the ceiling. It was RuPaul’s gown exhibit, and each mannequin wore a piece of couture RuPaul had made famous on the runway throughout the last nine seasons of Drag Race. I’d seen every episode of the show several times, replaying the same clips in my bedroom like a college football coach obsessing over plays. One mannequin wore an iridescent purple gown covered in sequins as delicate as fish scales. Another had its left leg reeled back like it was stuck in limbo between falling and righting herself.

They were beautiful and I was crying.

Not because they were beautiful. Not because they reminded me of myself, in the days and weeks following the shooting when I felt like something to be looked at. I was way too stoned to think metaphorically. In fact, the weed planted me firmly in reality. I was hyperaware of the drag queen a few feet away adjusting her chicken cutlets before a photo-op, the little girl yanking her mother from pink dress to blue to white.

It was, it hit me, the first time I’d been in a room full of bright, smiling queer people since the attack. I didn’t know what to do with something so sad and so good. The idea that we were here, and we were safe and okay, confused me, and I was filled with a wild sense of belonging to something larger than myself. It was the same feeling I’d chased those nights when all I could do was drink, cry, and dance. I thought, even after all we lost, look at us.

Look at us when we weren’t sad. Four years earlier. I was twenty-one, with my friends Arturo, Elyse, and Jason. We were at Pulse to watch the finale of season five of RuPaul’s Drag Race, sitting cross-legged on the dancefloor like it was our living room. The show was playing on a projector screen on stage, the captions on because none of us could go more than two seconds without screaming in tongues: “Yass mawma werk mawma slayyyyy!” Look at Jason, coming back from a table where there was a tall stack of pizza boxes and pressing paper plates with greasy slices into mine and Arturo’s hands. Look at Elyse turning down the free gay bar pizza, a wise choice. We were a tribe of people who had nothing better to do on a Friday night than watch TV at a club: The shot boy in a jockstrap hawking test tubes of tequila who would frequently message me on Grindr at three in the morning to ask, “What’s up?” A girl I went to high school with, when I knew her as a boy, sitting at the bar running her fingers through a cheap, synthetic wig. There was no conflict that night. We watched RuPaul’s Drag Race, screamed when Jinkx Monsoon, Seattle’s premiere Jewish narcoleptic drag queen, was crowned, then danced the rest of the night away.

“Are you okay?” a Drag Con employee asked. He wore a bright pink staff shirt and a frown on his face.

A tear crawled down my cheek where it surprised my upper lip. I swiped it with my tongue. The truth: It tasted incredible. If only I could grieve forever, then I would have an infinite supply to feed on.

Behind him, a mannequin in a silver gown hung in the air. The dress had soft, blossom-shaped panels along the bottom half and splintered off into sharp daggers above the waist. It looked like an origami pineapple.

“I’m just lost,” I told him, casually wiping my cheek. I hoped it was a good enough lie. There was a chance he might call for backup. Code Twink. Gay guy crying about some dresses.

I opened my guidebook to a map of the convention center. The cavernous, 720,000 square foot space was divided by crossways named after puns from the show. I knew exactly where I was, but I bit my lip and narrowed my eyes on the map, putting on my best damsel-in-distress voice.

“If we’re on Realness Road? What’s the fastest way to get to Back Rolls Boulevard? I’m late for a panel?”

He told me to go straight down Sickening Street and make a left when I hit the wall of wigs. Glamazon Lane would have been faster, but I followed his directions anyway.

I made it to the intersection of Death Drop Alley and Sissy That Walkway before I turned around to make sure the volunteer wasn’t following. That’s when I saw him. Not RuPaul, but close. An actor, seated at a booth with a small stack of DVDs, who I recognized from one of my favorite movies when I was in high school. It was a film about high school, and cliques, and breaking free from them. You’ve seen it. You would have moseyed around his table trying to catch a better look, too. It’d been years and I hadn’t heard of him landing any major roles since. He had dark bags under his eyes and an untamed beard that made him look twice his age. I wondered if he’d sold any DVDs. Who even bought DVDs anymore? Seated behind those ancient artifacts, he was a relic selling relics.

Jesus, is that what I looked like?

I was holding on desperately to Orlando and to Pulse, scared that if I let them go, I would never get them back. And what if I didn’t get them back? What if there was no more than what I had, and it was time to find something else?

I did not want to move on if moving on meant I would have to let Pulse, my first tribe, go. And yet, I had moved. I had a driver’s license with a California seal on it. I had an apartment with mice.

You have to enjoy your life, I told myself. Because you are alive and you can. Wasn’t that the whole point of getting the heartbeat memorial tattoo on my wrist? To remind myself that the people who wanted me gone lost, that life was going to continue to happen?

I bought pizza. My cellphone died. I was too stoned for any of this. I sat at an open power outlet by the bathrooms next to a group of teenage girls wearing neon tinsel wigs. One of them dumped her tote bag on the floor, unleashing an avalanche of condoms and party-sized packages of lube she’d collected at the several sex education booths throughout the convention center. Pleased with her day’s catch, she counted each one out loud as she deposited them back into her bag. It sounded like counting sheep, and around her fiftieth, I dozed off.

Meanwhile, as I slept, there were hundreds of people in line. They were standing on a long, pink carpet unrolled just for this occasion. Every few minutes, they inched forward. At the end of the line, all the way over there—Can you see? No, further back. Behind that partition—was the person they’d all been waiting hours to meet. Picture him, her, either/or, RuPaul doesn’t have a preference. Sitting on a chair? I wouldn’t dream of it. A throne! Gilded, with red velvet cushions. It’s RuPaul’s meet-and-greet booth. And what is RuPaul wearing? I don’t know. I was stoned and asleep. I was cradling a half-eaten pizza on a paper plate, tears drying on my cheeks, a teenage girl looking at me like, What happened tohim? Back to her loot. Fifty-one condoms. Fifty-three. Sixty.

The line moved again. Was it a minute? Was it even that? How much time do you get with RuPaul? And what do you say? What can you possibly say to God that he/she/they haven’t already heard before?

You could start with, I love the show.

There was a professional photographer. RuPaul doesn’t want you to take a selfie. He is asked for a selfie every day, and when the picture is too close, or the angle is all wrong, he is asked for another and another until it is perfect. He wants it to be perfect the first time because he values his time. He has a life to live.

Thank you, RuPaul answers.

Big fan of your work. You look fantastic. When I listen to you, I forget there are Nazis, that my husband cheated on me, that people hate us.

Thank you, thank you, and thank you. He means it. Really. To prove it to you, here it is with furrowed brows, with a sage nod, with a sigh, stamped forever in a perfect picture: Thank you.

Meanwhile, the pizza slid off my plate and left a grease stain on my jeans that would not come off for weeks, reminding me that instead of meeting RuPaul, I got stoned and cried on the floor.

I opened my eyes. The girl with the condoms was gone and there was a loud buzzing in my ear that I eventually realized was the sound of thousands of people having the best time of their lives at once. Even after all we lost, look at us. Actually, not us. Them.

In line for the first panel, a complete stranger had offered me a chicken wing. In front of me then, three drag queens dressed as bloody Victorian dolls cracked up as they fought over which bathroom to go into. A woman pushed a baby in a stroller, the boy’s eyes bugging out of their sockets at the colors, the laughter. If these people could find a way to be happy, why couldn’t I? They were enjoying this, because they were alive and they could. And I was alive, which meant that I could, too. Most of them were queer, and all of them loved Drag Race. Didn’t that join us in some small way? Not just our love of RuPaul, but the hate that drew us here in mass, so we could, for once, be in a room devoid of fear and the stink of tragedy. Didn’t just coming here make us a tribe?

Pam and I travelled across the country to make our hurt vanish, to forget the bad things that happened. Pulse was gone. Her husband cheated on her. These things would be true in Florida and Portland and RuPaul’s Drag Con. There is a kind of grief that you cannot escape. There is no way to heal from it, no way to move on.

Here is what you can do about it: You can cry and cry and cry, and then you can take the chicken wing, you can meet RuPaul while you can, you can stuff yourself into a gown and demand that people tip you for the effort. Or you can miss your life trying to change it.

I stood up. I took my guidebook out of my bag. There were things I still wanted to see.

Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Ruth Ozeki. She is an author, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. Her most recent novel, A Tale for the Time Being (2013), won the LA Times Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

]]>http://thenervousbreakdown.com/admin/2018/06/episode-529-poe-ballantine/feed/0Tessa Fontaine: The TNB Self-Interviewhttp://thenervousbreakdown.com/tnbnonfiction/2018/06/tessa-fontaine-the-tnb-self-interview/
http://thenervousbreakdown.com/tnbnonfiction/2018/06/tessa-fontaine-the-tnb-self-interview/#respondFri, 22 Jun 2018 16:43:46 +0000http://thenervousbreakdown.com/?p=129585Congrats on publishing your first book, The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death Defying Acts. How exciting! It must be wild to walk down the street and have people recognize you and take pictures with you and stuff!

That’s never happened.

Hm. Even when you stand in a bookstore and hold the book up in front of your head so a passerby can see that your face matches the face on the back of the jacket?

Right. Not then either.

I guess I’ll change my line of questioning, then.

Good idea.

WHY did you write this?

That’s more like it. I felt like a starving, razor-clawed monster was living inside my body, flicking my heart so it raced and tearing at my guts to get out. I’d never felt that before, that obsessive, relentless drive to tell a particular story. At first, I hope the book could be a distanced, journalistic account of America’s last traveling sideshow, but the monster living in me disagreed. The sideshow was inexorably tied up with the story of my mom’s long illness—she suffered a massive stroke that left her permanently unable to speak or walk—and watching her suffer, trying to help, failing to help, rethinking the risk we choose for our bodies, all of that was part of my sideshow story. That’s one of the things that struck me so much about the sideshow, that there were these extraordinary performers choosing to do dangerous acts and assume risk over and over again, acts that are sometimes painful—and how surprisingly parallel that was with the way my mom had to suffer in her various therapies as she worked so hard to try to recover, and then chose to suffer as she and my stepdad decided to take a long-delayed trip around the world, from which nobody thought they’d return. That suffering was necessary for the eventual wonder.

Why DID you write this?

Did means the writing of it is past, and while that is true, it is also not entirely right. In some ways, I don’t remember writing The Electric Woman—I know I did, obsessively, for two and a half years, and yet there are only a few shimmering moments of writing I remember, those rare unicorn experiences where a section comes out almost fully formed, as close as I have ever gotten to what people mean when they’ve captured the muse. But where are all the other memories of writing it, all those hours at the desk/couch/in bed/in a coffee shop/scribbling something on the back of a receipt while I’m in an airport bathroom? If they happened in the past, why aren’t they stored in my memory? Maybe writing occurs outside linear time. Though the book is now published and past the point where I’m allowed to make edits, I am still thinking about experiences I recount in the book, and the way I recount them, and why. Did I do a fair enough job? Would I recount them in the same way now? Why did I include that dull sentence? Why didn’t I remember that rain created suction in the tent stake holes? I think it would be interesting if a writer could edit and rerelease their book every few years. Not interesting to readers, probably, and a real nightmare for publishers, but certainly interesting to think about how a writer would choose to tell the same story differently over the course of their life. Though there’s an idea that we all just write our same obsessive story again and again. And maybe I’m already doing that. The novel I’m working on now has some parallel obsessions. Shit.

Why did YOU write this?

Although it’s a memoir, I think the book is mostly about other people: my mom & stepdad, and the sideshow performers. I am the physical connection point between those stories, but it was through watching their bodies, through understanding the historical context of sideshow performers who came before, and trying to understand who my mom was when she was a young woman and when I was young—the ways I’d misinterpreted her, perhaps—that the stories felt impossible to separate. We are each capable of writing our own exact stories. That’s the loveliest thing about teaching—the privilege of watching people find ways to tell theirs. But to get back to the question—I doubted myself a lot. Though I was made to write by my nasty internal monster, I was often not sure if a certain story was mine to tell. Would my sharing this particular story, I’d wonder, bring harm to this person? Did this person know I was taking daily notes? Is this little anecdote necessary for the larger story? And though those questions were anxiety-producing, I think they’re a necessary part of the process. To be an ethical writer, especially of nonfiction, questions of voice and agency are constant companions.

Why did you WRITE this?

Ok, ok, I’d love for this to have been a painting. Or TV show. Or graphic novel. Or poem. Or Broadway musical. Or movie. Or podcast. Or radio drama. Or series of greeting cards. If I’d had the skills to transform the medium in a way that better suited the story, boy howdy, I sure would have. But I don’t know how to sing opera, or paint with watercolors, or make Claymation well enough to tell the story. So, I wrote the damn thing.

Why did you write THIS?

UGH. I really tried not to! I wanted to write comedic stories about animals, like David Sedaris. Writing should be fun, I think sometimes, wiping tears from my cheeks and wine from my chin. But what writing should also be is married to obsession. I like to think about writing in terms of obsession, because the things we’re genuinely interested in, delighted by, the threads we tug and tug reflect our particular way of thinking—and that is one of the things that makes reading so exciting. An example is Amy Leach’s book of essays, Things That Are, which my friend Nate described to me as “nature essays on acid.” It’s perfect. Each little essay follows a series of acrobatic leaps of logic that make each sentence feel surprising and delightful, so the pleasure in reading comes not just from the subject matter, but also from the way we follow Leach’s logic between ideas as she connects disparate objects we’d have never put together ourselves. Years before I began writing The Electric Woman, before I even knew the sideshow I’d eventually join, the World of Wonders, existed, I was obsessed with sideshows. My stepdad told me stories about a very early friendship he had with a retired sideshow performer, a little person, whose mother had been a bearded lady. I had no idea what path would unfold when I started doing my own research, even when I joined the show. But I followed my obsession. My mom’s stroke and suffering was another obsession. It was a very hard, very painful obsession that was a big part of my daily life. Nothing I wrote could be separated from it, because it was the defining lens of my experience. But maybe a few projects down the line, I’ll get to those comedic animal stories.

Can you do a cartwheel?

No. Why would you bring that up?

TESSA FONTAINE is the author of The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, Amazon Editors’ Best Books of 2018 so far, New York Times Editor’s pick, and more. Other work can be found or is forthcoming in Glamour, The Believer, LitHub, FSG’s Works in Progress, Creative Nonfiction, The Rumpus, and other fine publications. She won the 2016 AWP Intro Award in Nonfiction, and has taught for the New York Times summer journeys, at the Universities of Alabama and Utah, in prisons in Alabama and Utah, and founded a Salt Lake City Writers in the Schools program. She lives with her fella and her fine pup in South Carolina.

It’s a perfect night for sleeping outside. I told my husband so, but he said I was crazy.

Why would you want to do that?

I dunno. Fresh air? A chance to be swallowed by the night sky? To watch the Perseids?

I spend all day at work on a computer. Craving the aboriginal—dreamtime in suburbia—is nothing if not an act of psychic survival.

Whatever.

I flatten a sleeping bag on the sun chair, plump a buckwheat pillow. I hear my husband now, snoring through the open window above me. I unzip my down wrapping, find carbon-free climate control by slipping my foot into the cool August night.

* * *

My family won’t attend local star parties. The astronomical society holds monthly meetings to discuss and view the varying and visible aspects of the cosmos. After our family vacation to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, when the moon was new and the sky shimmered with diamond astral bodies, I thought we’d be more gung-ho.

I widen my eyes as if this will more quickly allow them to absorb the night’s light. All black becomes black with blue. Silhouettes of trees. Does it really take thirty minutes for the human eye to differentiate color or shape in the dark? Are we really that blind? Or do we just live too fast for the naked eye to catch?

***

My father-in-law once gave us a telescope. I think my husband sold it through Craigslist. Without telling me.

***

There they are. The Perseids. Meteors leave trails that render the most beautiful fairy dust I’ve ever seen. You can’t miss them streaking across the sky, leaving behind glittery trails to blueprint the universe between the woods and the rooftop.

Our kids were so young then, all they wanted to do was go to bed. They did not see the adventure in laying flat in their pajamas on pumice sand around a volcanic lake well past bedtime to watch shooting stars.

* * *

Another time, while vacationing at the lake, meteors came in droves, shooting directly at us from a source far away to the east. The effect resembled hitting warp speed in the Star Trek spaceship Enterprise.

* * *

I can almost hear the plants breathing. The ones in the woods, the ones on this deck. I can’t take my eyes off the night, if only to hear the Earth better.

When I was a kid, we would go car camping. My dad and I used to stretch out on the picnic table to watch for satellites. Back then, they were rare discoveries, at least to me. It was the early 1970s. We talked about what it might mean to live in a multiverse. Now I see the flashing beacons of jets and the slow trolling of space junk so frequently that I lament their ordinariness.

I’m the only one who ever uses this deck.

* * *

We live about a mile inland. I can smell the oysters from here. The tide’s out, laying bare the geoduck, the red rocks, the moonsnails. A metallic smell to match the silver light show.

All summer long, I keep the bedroom open and listen. Deer crash through the fern grove. Coyotes wail. Dogs bark. There is the song of feral cats in heat, the occasional shriek of a wayward peacock left to survive in the wild, hoots from a barred owl. The musical growl of a raccoon chiding her kits. August.

Will my kids ever marvel over the infinite quality of even a single universe? If they can’t imagine sleeping outside, how will they ever find their way in the dark?

I want there to be a multiverse.

We camped during the summer after Saddam Hussein’s statue was felled like a tree. My family slept in a tent. Having risen to use the outhouse, I paused to absorb a heaven salted with cold white gems. Satellites cut noiselessly through their mosaic. Briefly, I imagined rockets launching half a world away in a shared universe. I stopped crying and wrote a poem about stargazing before re-entering the tent. It rained the rest of the trip.

***

Mental note: The trees are getting far too close to the house. They might erase this small but necessary claim I’ve staked, all within one season’s course.

* * *

Meteors consist of fragments which, because they pass through the tail of a comet, emerge brightly in its illumination. Even alone with my thoughts and with no reason to pretend wonder, I hold my breath in awe.

]]>http://thenervousbreakdown.com/admin/2018/06/episode-527-chelsea-hodson/feed/0Freedom is a Bitch: A Review of Valerie Wallace’s House of McQueen (2018)http://thenervousbreakdown.com/vbell/2018/06/freedom-is-a-bitch-a-review-of-valerie-wallaces-house-of-mcqueen-2018/
http://thenervousbreakdown.com/vbell/2018/06/freedom-is-a-bitch-a-review-of-valerie-wallaces-house-of-mcqueen-2018/#respondTue, 12 Jun 2018 15:59:38 +0000http://thenervousbreakdown.com/?p=129556The last thing on earth I ever thought I’d do was write about fashion.

I equated the industry with the worst of capitalism: defining human beings as consumers, tricking them into thinking they need the “new look” simply to make a profit. I equated the industry with patriarchy and women’s internalized misogyny: the command to dress as the object of the male gaze, the message that you are subhuman, at best, monstrous, at worst, if you don’t comply. Fashion, it seemed, was the perfect vehicle for what Louis Althusser called the interpellation of the subject by an ideological apparatus.

That is, until I read Valerie Wallace’s House of McQueen (Four Way Books 2018).

Wallace’s poems about the life and work of British fashion designer and couturier Alexander McQueen (1969-2010) are simultaneously sharp and whimsical, risk-taking and carefully wrought, and so layered and thought-provoking that they complicate any easy critique or celebration of the fashion industry. Neither hagiography nor hatchet-job, House of McQueen invites us to ponder fashion, like poetry, as a richly paradoxical evocation of “being alive.”

In Wallace’s hands, McQueen is as much a character as a historical figure, and the collection reads like a lyrical novel—think Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red—more than a biopic.

Fittingly, Wallace makes McQueen into a shapeshifting character, who speaks and moves differently through the unfolding of the poems, most of which are in persona: from a child with the insight that in Cinderella “it was the dress / That saved her. All the rest was just a story,” to the designer hell-bent on unearthing “a buried history of England and Scotland,” to a young, nerdy ornithologist, to a self-reflective, but unapologetic, scholar of the erotic:

[…] we
Fetch each other in and out of shadows. Our
Wrestle with hair, what dress to wear. Needles
Of down, parachutes of arrested color
Tied with fangs. I may be tough & selfish but what
Do you expect? I think with my bare hands.

Wallace’s poems also dabble in what many readers might think of most when they think of McQueen, gender trouble:

Wool of untroubled sheep, drafted, cut bundled.
Not that I need talk of the world’s grimness

Constantly, but some awareness would be
Nice. None of them here ever stole his sister’s

Bra off the clothesline and wore it screaming
Down the streets! No one ever paid for it

Like I did…

Many, if not all, of these characters move both within and against capitalism, both within and against patriarchy and heteronormativity: “Perform my clothes like you’re devastated. / I’m not finished ‘til you’re implicated.” (from “Bespoke, 2. Made out of Kate Moss’ words.”)

Even more fittingly, the poems rely on sonic structures and enjambment to produce surprise—sometimes subtle, sometimes jarring—much in the way that McQueen’s cutting and shaping of cloth did for the human body. In “McQueen Self-Portrait as Bestiary,” the speaker becomes a raven, or a crow: “I’ll use my own feathers if I have to, / You hear me? You hear me? You hear me? You hear me?” In “McQueen’s Bop with the Interviewer,” the speaker’s enjambed refrain reads, “I want people to be afraid / of the women I dress.”

In many cases, everyday objects take on the uncanny power of violence, of creation, until they de-familiarize the way we see these things (and ourselves), until they feel almost animate. Needles, lace, linen, sleeves, leaves, medical slides, raindrops, tinfoil, skin, seams, thimble, button, thread, and, of course, “Shears”:

Two ships run together like quicksilver
Driven by a storm along the littoral

Ultimately, the collection is also an aesthetic homage. As a fellow “fabricator,” McQueen is Wallace’s imaginary mentor and predecessor, and she re-reifies his fabrics into the materiality of language. Although part of me still resists the fetishization of any fashion designer, this is a book of poems I will return to again and again. One of my favorite is the short, in your face proclamation, “I’m a Free Bitch” in which “engineered silk” morphs into “light changing to water,” “alive like leaving.” As I close House of McQueen, this is what I want to remember: how the poems briefly made me feel free of the “bitch,” but also free to “bitch,” and free as a “bitch.” Read it and join me.

Funny you should ask. JUNKIE WIFE, my erotic chapbook chronicling my first, dysfunctional, drug-fueled marriage, has just been published by Moon Tide Press, with a foreword by the great Bill Mohr. I’m reading all over town. (Details on my website.)

Tell me more:

JUNKIE WIFE reads more like a story than a random collection of poems. If you like menage a trois, hard narcotics, brutal truths, and cannoli, you’ll love JUNKIE WIFE.

You write a lot about sex. It’s harder than it looks. Any advice?

Write the space around it. Much as Julia Cameron, in The Artist’s Way, teaches drawing by telling students to “draw the space around their subject”. I think the great mistake people make when trying to write erotica is being overly explicit at the expense of story.

What’s on your nightstand right now?

Jenn Givhan’s Landscape with Headless Mama, Lynn Marie Houston’s The Mauled Keeper, Beate Sigriddaughter’s Xanthippe and Her Friends, Ace Boggess’s The Prisoners, and D.A. Powell’s Repast: Tea Lunch Cocktails. I recently featured with him at the Marin Cultural Center in Northern California. It was a great thrill. He is one of my poetry heroes!

What do you do when you’re not writing?

I take a lot of photographs, both in my studio and on the street. I read voraciously. I like long walks on the beach. I’m a fool for daily sex. And movies.

The Dead Kid Poems, a chapbook written post-State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies, (2015). It contains poems about life after the death of my son, as well as poems about my meth-addicted niece, “Anna.” To be published by KYSO Flash Press in early 2019. My next full-length collection, Sex, With a Side of Sorrow, is ready to be edited. And a noir, graphic novella, My Criminal Boyfriend, is on track for a completed first draft by the end of 2018.

What’s the best part about being a poet?

When people tell me/write me that my fearlessness has made them fearless, too.

]]>http://thenervousbreakdown.com/arfancher/2018/06/alexis-rhone-fancher-the-tnb-self-interview-3/feed/2The Dracaena Plant in My Apartment on Beachwood Dr.http://thenervousbreakdown.com/arfancher/2018/06/the-dracaena-plant-in-my-apartment-on-beachwood-dr/
http://thenervousbreakdown.com/arfancher/2018/06/the-dracaena-plant-in-my-apartment-on-beachwood-dr/#respondMon, 04 Jun 2018 16:01:14 +0000http://thenervousbreakdown.com/?p=1295421.
when I see I’ve overwatered it again, I jab
the turkey baster into the rust-colored runoff
before the water spills over,
onto the hardwood floor.

in our mid-town apartment,
the harsh light sears the spiky leaves.

it reminds me of summer,
when you left me here on Beachwood Dr.
and I shot Demerol
my rust-colored blood backing up in the syringe,
the same pierce of yellow light,
the sharp spike breaking my skin.

2.
I remember what you said about overkill,
how I could love a thing to death.

my jaundiced face mirrored
the ailing yellow of the dracaena’s tired leaves,
the green of it, peaked. off-color.
my sad visage the hue of drowning,
the flood of the Demerol too much like
pleasure.

3.
the dracaena hides a stain
on the hardwood floor in the
shape of a man. A murky, splayed patch
between the closet and the bed.

since you disappeared, some nights
I lie down on that stain,
my body mimicking the way I’d lie
on top of you, arms and legs akimbo.
I imagine you, oozing out
onto the hardwood, a mess.

the landlord, under duress admitted
that a dead man had lain there
till long past rigor, seeping fluids
like an overwatered plant
till he and the floor had organically
merged into one.

Alexis Rhone Fancher An earlier version published in Rattle, Tribute To L.A. Poets, June, 2016

]]>http://thenervousbreakdown.com/admin/2018/06/episode-525-jonathan-evison/feed/0Susan Tepper’s Monte Carlo Days & Nightshttp://thenervousbreakdown.com/dackley/2018/05/susan-teppers-monte-carlo-days-nights/
http://thenervousbreakdown.com/dackley/2018/05/susan-teppers-monte-carlo-days-nights/#respondThu, 31 May 2018 19:50:22 +0000http://thenervousbreakdown.com/?p=129530At first glance, Susan Tepper’s novella Monte Carlo Days & Nights seemed on the light side: an American man and woman, she on the north side of her twenties, an attractive Airline “stew,” he a fortyish executive for a music company, on a weeks’ vacation together in Monte Carlo, a place that has always seemed to me as comically ersatz and overblown as Fredonia – though I like Susan’s work, particularly her masterful short fiction.

For me the sense of lightness, however, was quickly dispelled by her control of her means, whatever else she might be up to. In this work she marries the intensity of focus, the crisp delineation and the vivid, but pruned imagery of short fiction, with the unfolding of a novelistic narrative and a long look at character, dovetailing the two in short bits that are somewhat complete in themselves but also serve as chapters in the longer narrative, which for the most part, plays out over their week in Monte Carlo.

Aside from its overall construction, the language of the book, which is in essence the voice of the woman who is the first person narrator – nameless, so far as I could tell, as is her male paramour – is terse, in short crisp not terribly descriptive sentences. This is not meant as criticism by the way, just a comment on the approach, which favors primary colors, depends mainly on nouns and verbs, and simple declarative sentences and a vocabulary that is direct and declarative, more Hemingway, say, than Edith Wharton. Which is in no way to say that the text is not complex, but rather that the complexities occur within some fairly strict limits and have to do less with exploiting language and more with representing the imperatives of an individual’s personality and desires confronting a social world that so structures and directs those desires that it is impossible to say at a given moment what they consist of, where ultimately they come from or tend toward, and not only whether they are “authentic,” but what that authenticity might, at bottom, consist of if, indeed, it could ever be plumbed.

Once on an Air France flight coming into Logan from Paris, my wife and I sat facing two stewardesses, attractive, experienced, smooth and pleasant, who had pampered us and the other passengers for the long tiresome flight back to reality from our particular stay in paradise. They were belted into seats just in front of and facing us in the economy compartment, the captain having ordered seatbelts because we were circling that grim New England airport, over rooftops and glimpses of harbor, through a thick patchy fog, speeding up and slowing down for the better part of an hour in an invisible queue of planes waiting like ours for permission to land. My fear was not at all assuaged when I looked at the face of the senior of the two stewardesses as she glanced behind her toward the cabin with her eyes showing white all around, failing for once the requirement to divert our attention from the essential fact that we were being propelled at high speed, under dicey conditions, above the safety of earth in what bore an uncomfortable resemblance to a flying coffin. The nature of the occupation being to distract means that the distractor is in the position of having to see what others can avoid.

This is spelled out in an early chapter where the narrator describes cleaning up the planes that she and the other stewardesses have to undertake when the regular cleaning crews go on strike, a task described in the most clinical and therefore squalid detail: the sweeping of gum-clotted carpets, the fingering of cigarette butts from ash-trays and worst of all, the cleaning of lavatories and the pumping out of the vile blue chemical which holds the passengers’ various digestive emanations in suspension, spattering the protagonist despite the protection of coveralls, rubber gloves, helmet and goggles.

No surprise that the various Amazon reviews I read have focused on many different aspects of the book, because one of the characteristics of Susan Tepper’s considerable art is to engender a number of possible meanings, but I was surprised by how few — only one review, I think – even mentioned the plane cleaning episode, which underpins much of the ambivalence of the work. The narrator’s struggle is to respond to the surfaces of life, its beautiful if artificial manifestations, and preserve them from the ugliness and squalor that keep thrusting in. She may be romantic in her yearnings and inclinations, but her – almost literal – immersion in such realities, won’t let her avoid them whenever they appear. She can never overlook or unsee what has been seen, except by willing herself to look away. This encircles every moment of pleasure, aesthetic or sensual, with a ruthless analytic scrutiny which undermines it: only the oblivion of sex is a reliable anodyne to disillusion, and even their lovemaking, toward the end, is infiltrated with the possibility that her lover has equated her with the Bangkok whores he looks forward to patronizing on his next sojourn abroad.

A Marxist critic might have a field day with Tepper’s book by exploring in detail how many of the incidents, how many of its reference points are in one sense or another economic. It is tempting to follow that course, for there is no escaping the transactional nature of the interactions, whether a friendly female photographer casually mentioning she wants to send the snaps of the narrator and her man out on the web; the gambler who grabs her arm to hold her near him “for luck,” and then pays her off from his winnings, sickening her, even as her lover has jovially allowed it to happen, as if temporarily leasing her out to this stranger; and the repeated shopping, comparison of this commodity or that, this pot versus that Limoges, and the pricing of all things at every level from love to breakfast …one could go on almost indefinitely.

But to go down that road would be to turn a different inquiry into something narrower, more sociological or political than perhaps intended. The true crisis of the book is the narrator’s struggle, not in innocence, for she is too knowing to be easily deceived by the surfaces all around her, to find a space – a last space, I’m tempted to say, for she has seen many – here in this little paradise of dreams, beauty and wealth where her wish to be appreciated, loved and valued for her own worth will be allowed. For if it can’t happen in Monte Carlo, with the putative man of her dreams, then where?

What is moving about the book is how valiantly the narrator struggles – with herself, as all meaningful struggle is – between her own wish to lose herself in the appearances, and to find in them romance and the honesty in her that sees the ugliness lurking cheek by jowl with every appearance. That this struggle is more than merely “romantic;” or socially aspirational, but one for the survival of the authentic self in a world where, like they say, everything, even you and me, is some kind of commodity – that it is existential for this woman and subject to despair, and therefore is the material of tragedy, you might have to take my word for, even after you have read it.

But before you dismiss the notion, consider this passage on page 34, where the narrator and her boyfriend in their bathing suits are drinking Perrier and tanning at poolside, on a hotel rooftop terrace where the luxury and calm has been disturbed by several wealthy old women enraged that their husbands have been ogling the insouciantly naked girls sitting on the edge of the pool. That the narrator’s disgust has perhaps turned on herself with the understanding that if she wants to be part of this she will have to be implicated in all of it, comes in this concluding passage of the chapter:

The pool boy comes over and I order another Perrier and pretend to be having fun. The noise and commotion increases. Two of the wives get out of their chaises and approach the naked girls. Demanding they cover up. The French girls just arch their backs laughing.

Finally I stand up, too, moving toward the railing. A long way down is the sparkling Mediterranean. Monte’s hilly streets in the opposite direction.

I’m wishing the crazy wives would just shut up. This sort of thing disturbs me. Or maybe something else. I don’t know. Being here with him is fabulous and terrible at once. I think about diving off the rail. That might stop all this racket. Woman buttresses off hotel roof the newspapers would say.

Here no matter which way you look is paradise.

Among trivial appearances, in the palace of illusion even, survival of the authentic self is nothing trivial; and there is nothing trivial about Susan Tepper’s rendering of it: she is deadly serious.

]]>http://thenervousbreakdown.com/dackley/2018/05/susan-teppers-monte-carlo-days-nights/feed/0July: The Dying of the Light, by Robert Goolrickhttp://thenervousbreakdown.com/admin/2018/05/july-the-dying-of-the-light-by-robert-goolrick/
http://thenervousbreakdown.com/admin/2018/05/july-the-dying-of-the-light-by-robert-goolrick/#commentsThu, 31 May 2018 16:42:16 +0000http://thenervousbreakdown.com/?p=129525Available from Harper

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“Goolrick’s best book yet. A brilliant mashup of all the old greats, Faulkner and Fitzgerald and DH Lawrence, The Dying of the Light reads like Absolom, Absolom! meets The Great Gatsby meets Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” —Philipp Meyer, New York Times bestselling author of The Son

From the author of the bestselling A Reliable Wife comes a dramatic, passionate tale of a glamorous Southern debutante who marries for money and ultimately suffers for love—a southern gothic as written by Dominick Dunne.

It begins with a house and ends in ashes . . .

Diana Cooke was “born with the century” and came of age just after World War I. The daughter of Virginia gentry, she knew early that her parents had only one asset, besides her famous beauty: their stately house, Saratoga, the largest in the commonwealth, which has hosted the crème of society and Hollywood royalty. Though they are land-rich, the Cookes do not have the means to sustain the estate. Without a wealthy husband, Diana will lose the mansion that has been the heart and soul of her family for five generations.

The mysterious Captain Copperton is an outsider with no bloodline but plenty of cash. Seeing the ravishing nineteen-year-old Diana for the first time, he’s determined to have her. Diana knows that marrying him would make the Cookes solvent and ensure that Saratoga will always be theirs. Yet Copperton is cruel as well as vulgar; while she admires his money, she cannot abide him. Carrying the weight of Saratoga and generations of Cookes on her shoulders, she ultimately succumbs to duty, sacrificing everything, including love.

Luckily for Diana, fate intervenes. Her union with Copperton is brief and gives her a son she adores. But when her handsome, charming Ashton, now grown, returns to Saratoga with his college roommate, the real scandal and tragedy begins.

Reveling in the secrets, mores, and society of twentieth-century genteel Southern life, The Dying of the Light is a romance, a melodrama, and a cautionary tale told with the grandeur and sweep of an epic Hollywood classic.

Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Michelle Dean. She is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle’s 2016 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Her new book is called Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, available now from Grove Press.

Let’s start with that cover – it is both lovely and bizarre. Where did it come from?

Isn’t it? It’s an illustration from an early 17th-century anatomy textbook on fetal formation by Adriaan van Spiegel and Giulio Casseri I came across in the process of researching historical medical texts. The governing idea of this manuscript was the concept of maternal imagination – that a mother’s thoughts and experiences, especially traumatic ones, affect fetal formation and can be responsible for monstrous births. This illustration seemed to embody both of those – specific anatomical detail of pregnancy combined with that imaginative presentation of the baby blooming from the mother’s abdomen. And I love how the book designer curled the mother’s hand around the C.

How has your imagination formed your son?

Our son is adopted, so while he didn’t share my body, I constantly wonder about how I’ve shaped him. He shares my love of perfume and swearing, and he loves to go mushroom hunting with me though he dislikes eating them. Mostly, I obsess over the ways I’m probably fucking him up.

What did you worry about fucking up with this book? What do you worry you got wrong?

I worried – and still worry – about whether I appropriated stories of deformity and/or of other cultures. I tried hard to do due diligence with my research into anatomical medical histories and into 19th-century Canton, but I realize the lens of those research sources, and my own writing, is largely from a white, colonizing, able-bodied perspective. I didn’t want my book to be the spectacle of the freakshow – I wanted the individuals in these poems to be fully represented, not metaphors. I still don’t know if I got it right. I keep waiting to be called out.

There are a lot of Notes at the end of this book. Like, a LOT. Why so much research? Why not just write about yourself?

All my books are that way. I don’t like to write about myself. I get obsessed with a particular topic (Fifties pinup Bettie Page, perfume, monstrous births) and go down a research rabbit hole, and eventually dig out and write about it. I also have a strong academic background, so I feel obligated not only to research thoroughly, but also document that research. I do look for the pertinent facts and details of my topics, but I also look for the weird marginalia or offhand comments.

Why don’t you like to write about yourself?

I just don’t. Early on, I got annoyed with the assumption that the poetic “I” = the poet, so I distanced myself from that by writing persona and/or documentary poems. I do write somewhat more about myself in my prose, but it makes me squirm. I love the spotlight; I hate the spotlight.

You sound like a Leo with Taurus rising.

Yes. Yes, I am.

You say you’ve been writing about perfume. If this book had a perfume or scent, what would it be?

Oh, wow. Interesting. Maybe something like Serge Lutens’ Cuir Mauresque or vintage Guerlain Vol de Nuit, which smell to me like leather-bound books – that reminds me of all the medical texts. But with a splash of formaldehyde?

Didn’t this book have an unusual path to publication? What happened?

The first would-be publisher of this book folded while it was still in production. This was a small press with a good reputation, but authors were hearing rumors of problems before we all got a mass email from the editor/owner. Other sympathetic presses and editors generously offered to look at orphaned manuscripts. After Conjoining got picked up by Sable Books, it felt like destiny – not only was its editor, Melissa Hassard, from North Carolina like me and a joy to work with, but at the same time she was reprinting Walking Out (1975), the first book of poems from Betty Adcock who was my first mentor, way back when I was a baby poet first starting to write seriously. I’m so grateful.

You’re known mostly for writing in form. Is all your work in form? Why?

I came to poetry from music, and the structures of verse felt very natural for me. I have a lot of training in traditional verse forms. While I do swing both ways (traditional v. free verse, poetry v. prose), structure is still very important in my writing as I try to find the perfect form to pair with the content so they engage and inform each other. In Conjoining, there are poems in traditional forms (villanelles, contrapuntals, etc.) that double back and blend together to mimic the conjoining of twins. But when I write free verse, it’s also very conscious of form, like poems in heavily enjambed couplets to create tension between pairing and separation. Especially when writing about so-called “deformity,” it felt important to write with attention to form, to how these bodies are forms in and of themselves. I find myself applying form even when I write in prose, imposing artificial constraints to heighten tension in the prose.

This book was completed in 2015, and since then, apart from the book, you haven’t written or published any poetry. Why not? Do you think you’ll write it again?

I’ve mostly been writing and publishing nonfiction – lyric essays and haibun that are heavily influenced by poetry, as well as longer essays. I continue to read a lot of poetry, but haven’t been writing it. I do have a narrative project in mind, a necropastoral folktale set in Northwoods Minnesota, and the sketches I’ve done for it have been in prose poetry, so maybe that will be my way back.

]]>http://thenervousbreakdown.com/hczerwiec/2018/05/heidi-czerwiec-the-tnb-self-interview/feed/0The Girl Who Gave Birth to Rabbitshttp://thenervousbreakdown.com/hczerwiec/2018/05/the-girl-who-gave-birth-to-rabbits/
http://thenervousbreakdown.com/hczerwiec/2018/05/the-girl-who-gave-birth-to-rabbits/#respondMon, 28 May 2018 16:01:03 +0000http://thenervousbreakdown.com/?p=129508Mary Toft knew how it felt with child –
three birthed, one dead – but in the field,
heavy with her fourth, up starts a hare.
The effect is more than Mary can bear:the rabbit all day long ran in my head.
That August, a large lump of flesh bled
from her body, and by October: rabbits,
litters of them, enough for every Cabinet
of Wonder in London. But was it fair or fake?Methought they there a burrow tried to make.
Mary, Mother Incarnate, carny
of the most marvelous yarn –the rabbits all day long ran in my head –
snared hare, lapful of lapins bred
in her Welsh rarebit, follicular,
cuniculous, mad with rabbit fever,
rabid with fervor to birth, quaint
trickster, canny coney, cunning cunt.
]]>http://thenervousbreakdown.com/hczerwiec/2018/05/the-girl-who-gave-birth-to-rabbits/feed/0Episode 523 — Adrian Todd Zunigahttp://thenervousbreakdown.com/admin/2018/05/episode-523-adrian-todd-zuniga/
http://thenervousbreakdown.com/admin/2018/05/episode-523-adrian-todd-zuniga/#respondSun, 27 May 2018 05:08:03 +0000http://thenervousbreakdown.com/?p=129504

Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Adrian Todd Zuniga. His debut novel, Collision Theory, is available from Rare Bird Books. He is also the founder and host of the popular reading series Literary Death Match.

This is Adrian’s second time on the program. He first appeared in Episode 403on March 9, 2016.

Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Jonathan Ames. His latest book is called You Were Never Really Here (Vintage). It has recently been adapted into a major motion picture starring Joaquin Phoenix. Ames also writes for television, having created the shows Blunt Talk (Starz 2015-2016), starring Patrick Stewart, and Bored to Death (HBO 2009-2011), starring Jason Schwartzman and Zach Galifianakis.

]]>http://thenervousbreakdown.com/admin/2018/05/episode-520-jonathan-ames/feed/0Ivory Pearl: A Review of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s Final Novelhttp://thenervousbreakdown.com/jpsmith/2018/05/ivory-pearl-a-review-of-jean-patrick-manchettes-final-novel/
http://thenervousbreakdown.com/jpsmith/2018/05/ivory-pearl-a-review-of-jean-patrick-manchettes-final-novel/#respondTue, 15 May 2018 17:56:37 +0000http://thenervousbreakdown.com/?p=129480“Her heart was not hardened but her skin was thick,” writes Jean-Patrick Manchette of the titular protagonist in his last, unfinished novel, Ivory Pearl, translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith with a superb ear for Manchette’s incomparable voice that easily shifts between the grit of the hyperfactual—“…in his right hand he held a semiautomatic Sauer Model 38 chambered in .380 ACP and fitted with a silencer”—and the nimble ability to sketch with the sparest of words the heart of a character, laid out, in this case, in three easy steps: “She wanted to become a professional photographer. She dreamt of meeting Robert Capa. She had an alarming predilection for images of dead bodies.” Ivy is a survivor who at one point casually, almost happily, admits having conveniently lost her appendix when she “caught that Viet round in ‘52.” And like so many other of Manchette’s characters, she also knows her jazz. Everything helps when you’re on a mission.

Manchette once called the crime novel “the great moral literature of our time,” which for him meant dealing not just with the traditional tropes of the policier or the noir, but in situating the narrative in the wider world, with its geopolitics and the masters of the dark arts of politics and espionage. It’s what initially separated Manchette from his generation of French thriller writers, who tended to adhere to the American model: bad guys do bad things, good guys (or bad guys turned, at least for a few hundred pages, better, with an option to relapse at any time) restore order. There were always a few outliers who were paving their own unique ways in the genre, but Manchette was the most politically committed of them. Born in 1942 to parents who had fled the Paris banlieue during the German Occupation, his family returned to a working-class district south of Paris in 1945. In his teens he began to read detective and science-fiction novels and comic books, all the while immersing himself in American films. He also became enamored of American jazz, and began playing tenor and alto saxophone. When he was eighteen, in 1960, he became politically active, describing himself as a “militant gauchiste,” especially with what was happening with France in Algeria. Apart from writing his own novels, he wrote screenplays for, among other, Claude Chabrol, and was a translator of many American thrillers and detective novels, including several books by Ross Thomas.

With his acute political conscience and a heightened sense of morality comes, in this latest translation, a dedication to the history of our times, from the end of the Second World War to, had Manchette not died of lung cancer in 1995, the Cuban Revolution and beyond. In his journal entry for December 13th, 1988, Manchette writes of creating a néothriller, something more ambitious than the genre he helped to create, the néo-polar, developing a single storyline over several volumes, all dealing with covert action and featuring a single heroine, Ivory Pearl. This Balzacian project, as he describes it in his journal, was never realized.

Ivory Pearl, a photographer who has been witness to the climactic political moments from the fall of Berlin in 1945 to pre-revolutionary Cuba and beyond, is one of J-P Manchette’s most indelible and rounded characters, someone full of potential for later volumes, and it’s our loss that he died leaving the work unfinished. All credit, then, to his son, Doug Headline (Manchette in English means just that—a newspaper headline), for providing the reader with Manchette’s notes on how the work would have continued had he not died.

It opens with the apparent kidnapping (and possibly death) of a young girl, Alba Black, the niece of an international arms trafficker, whom we meet again only years later when Ivory tracks her down to Cuba’s Sierra Maestra. Such is the foundation for this story, which is not just a tale of survival and grit, but reflects in its time-frame and settings Manchette’s obsessions with political movements all across the globe. In March, 1956, Ivory is in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra. Eight months later Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and others would end up there to prepare to battle the Batista regime, eventually, in the first hours of January 1959, taking over the government. Alone, with the proficiency learned only from hard experience, she sets up camp, prepares her photographic lab, drinks rum, smokes a cigar, and sleeps under the stars. What she doesn’t know is that she’s being watched.

In cinematic terms, Ivory Peal is a thoroughly modern character—tough, resilient, courageous and not without wit, bringing to mind Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road. Though the novel was originally published in 1996, even twenty-odd years later Ivory seems alive, completely credible. Place her in any tense situation and she’ll own the scene. The fact that this is an unfinished novel should not deter readers, especially those who’ve been reading Manchette’s English translations published by New York Review Books. It’s a rich, elegantly-plotted work that, even had the author lived to see the series to its final volume, still must be considered one of his strongest efforts, standing alongside Three to Kill and The Prone Gunman.

]]>http://thenervousbreakdown.com/jpsmith/2018/05/ivory-pearl-a-review-of-jean-patrick-manchettes-final-novel/feed/0June Book Club Pick: Tonight I’m Someone Else, by Chelsea Hodsonhttp://thenervousbreakdown.com/admin/2018/05/june-book-club-pick-tonight-im-someone-else-by-chelsea-hodson/
http://thenervousbreakdown.com/admin/2018/05/june-book-club-pick-tonight-im-someone-else-by-chelsea-hodson/#respondTue, 15 May 2018 17:40:09 +0000http://thenervousbreakdown.com/?p=129472The TNB Book Club is pleased to announce that we’ll be reading Tonight I’m Someone Else (Holt Paperbacks), the wonderful and hotly anticipated new essay collection by Chelsea Hodson, in June.

Says Amy Hempel: “This book has dark humor, recklessness, exhilaration….I felt I was reading a writer who would tell harder truths than many other writers, and she turns this nerve against herself to good effect.”

And Sarah Manguso says: “Chelsea Hodson tests herself against her desires, grapples with their consequences, and presents a surgically precise account of what they were to her. These essays are bewitching―despite their discipline and rigor, you can smell the blood.”

Sign up now to receive your copy! (Sign-up deadline for this title: May 15, 2018.)

Subscription Options

“I had a real romance with this book.” —Miranda July

A highly anticipated collection, from the writer Maggie Nelson has called, “bracingly good…refreshing and welcome,” that explores the myriad ways in which desire and commodification intersect.

From graffiti gangs and Grand Theft Auto to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in these essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing.

Starting with Hodson’s own work experience, which ranges from the mundane to the bizarre―including modeling and working on a NASA Mars mission― Hodson expands outward, looking at the ways in which the human will submits, whether in the marketplace or in a relationship. Both tender and jarring, this collection is relevant to anyone who’s ever searched for what the self is worth.

Hodson’s accumulation within each piece is purposeful, and her prose vivid, clear, and sometimes even shocking, as she explores the wonderful and strange forms of desire. Tonight I’m Someone Else is a fresh, poetic debut from an exciting emerging voice, in which Hodson asks, “How much can a body endure?” And the resounding answer: “Almost everything.”

Nick had presence. He was a tall, solid bodybuilder. Sharp, chiseled angles defined his jaw and shoulders. He wore a worn green T-shirt and jeans to his first therapy session. The muscles in his chest and arms were more defined than on anyone I’d ever seen. When he shook my hand, it felt like he wore a catcher’s mitt. I could barely get my hand around his.

I don’t intimidate easily, but I felt humbled by his size. He seemed a yin-yang blend of power and stillness.

“Hey,” he said as his catcher’s mitt swallowed my hand. “Hey.”

“Cool.” Nick pointed to a large leather recliner. “It’s all yours.” I gestured toward it.

If he had asked for my chair I wouldn’t have batted an eye in finding somewhere else to sit. “Can I take notes?” I asked.

“Knock yourself out, man.”

“So what brings you here?” I clicked my pen.

“Took a course at NYU and it was cool. Like I opened up. Group therapy course, and the dude teaching it was cool. I didn’t open the throttle on what was percolating, but I asked him, like who knows about this kind of thing, and he said you’re the dude, so, like boom.” He flicked his fingertips for emphasis. “Here I am.”

“I’m the dude for . . .”

“Psychodrama, man. Like, I checked you out, you know, Googled you and like that.” He made typing gestures with his fingers on an imaginary keyboard.

“Oh, right.” I nodded.

“So, bingo.” He turned his palms faceup. “So, what was percolating?”

He looked at me. Then everything about him changed. This intense, strong, intimidating, powerful man folded into himself. His large frame had been squarely positioned in the chair, fingertips resting gently on his kneecaps. Now his hands retracted. He looked down and away. His straight back and magnified chest seemed to have withered. Like a life-sized balloon, his air had been let out.

He shook his head slightly. “Wow, man. Wow, this is more fucked up than I thought. Can you handle this?”

How was I supposed to answer that type of question? I didn’t even know what we were talking about.“Like I said, we don’t have to do this all in one day. Don’t push yourself.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the whole fucking problem, isn’t it?” His intensity surprised me. “That’s all I fucking do is push my fucking self so I don’t have to deal with this shit, right?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ve got to deal with this or I’m just going to stay fucked. I’m just going to be living the life I think I should, instead of the life I was meant to live.”

“You’re dealing with it now in the most direct way possible. You

brought yourself in here to do the work. Right now, you’re in this moment and you’re doing it. There’s no more direct way to deal.”

It appeared as if he was slowly being filled with helium. His body unfolded and he inflated back to his original stance and presence. The transformation was palpable. Wherever he had gone, he had returned. The conversion took a full minute. A slight smile crossed his face as his fingertips returned to his kneecaps. “Cool.”

“Very cool.” What else could I say?

As if the helium had reached the liftoff point, he rose out of his chair and stuck out his catcher’s mitt. It felt like an unspoken game of Simon Says. I stood up and shook his hand.

“Same time next week?” he asked. “There’s still a lot more time, you know.” “Nah, I’m cool.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I got it. I’ll leave a check with your secretary.”

I was stunned, and a bit intimidated. Was I going to try to stop this guy from leaving? Not a chance. “She’ll set you up for next week,” I said as he let go of my hand.

“Yeah, actually taught a class a while back on variations and similarities in composer styles.”

“Where did you teach it?” “Harvard.”

I smiled at what I thought was a joke.

“They have their heads pretty fucking far up their asses there, but it was cool. The students dug it.”

“Harvard?”

“Yeah, it’s a college up in Boston.”

“Oh, that Harvard.” Was he auditioning me again? “Any other places?”

“Juilliard, but only strings. Stanford, percussion. That was a sweet gig.” He rapped off a series of drum riffs on the edge of the chair.“Back then down and around to NYU, Tisch, doubled back there to do the PhD thing . . .”

“PhD thing?”

“Yeah, but the dissertation stalled me, and I couldn’t figure out a reason to finish. So, wham-bam back to England and in love,” he paused to hold his right hand to his heart with his eyes closed and his left hand up in the air, “and then did the lighting for the Globe Theater. Then the young lady said she couldn’t live with a fucking addict, so I shot up, OD’d, and awoke ten years later as a tenzo in a Zen monastery in Massachusetts.”

“You’ve taught at Harvard, Juilliard, Stanford, and NYU. And you were the cook in a Zen monastery?”

“So you know about the tenzo, cool. Learned the ultimate mantra there too, Om Mani Padme Hum,” he chanted with his eyes closed. “Praise to the jewel in the lotus, man. Also, did a summer gig at Princeton one year and two semesters at Cornell. You know what I like about Cornell?”

“Tell me.”

“Abso-fucking-lutely nothing.”

“Is there an Ivy League school you haven’t been to?” “U Penn.”

“How’d you miss them?”

“You’ve got to drive through the war zone, man, to get there. Fuck them. They probably wouldn’t dig my groove anyway. But I do love Ben Franklin.”

“What instruments do you play?”

“Trick question, man, we’ll be here all day. Shorter answer is what don’t I play.”

“I’ll bite.”

“The hung, man. I can play it, but it’s too intense for me. I trip out.” “I don’t even know what that is.”

“It’s a drum, man, looks like a spaceship and sounds like one. Forget it. If I play that, it’s like I’m on acid.”

“Wait until you see this segue; you’re gonna love it.” “Go, man, go.” He box-punched the air.

“What kind of drugs did you, or do you, use?”

“Smooth, man. Picked right up on the acid thing. Well, you’re gonna get the same answer as the instruments, man. The shorter list is what I didn’t take.”

“And that would be . . .”

“Belladonna, man. Once I heard Manson did that, I just freaked for some reason and kept it off the list.” He looked at me intensely. “But let me anticipate your next question. My drug of choice? Heroin, man, the occasional speedball, but man, for a little rush-o-mundo and to keep from crashing, but there is nothing like the poppy, man. That was it. Hence why I liked that bit about you, and your cousin, and your patient.”

“Right,” I said. “How bad?”

“How bad?” he said, letting himself laugh. “How bad is there? I mean I’d do anything, give anything to get it. Anything.”

“Okay, how about the flip side: Why’d you stop?” “’Cause I lied.”

“Lied?”

“There was one thing I would give to get it.” “And that would be?”

“My life, man. I realized it was taking it a dime at a time and that just woke me the fuck up.”

“How’d you quit?”

“Planned an OD, wrote down the dosage, history, got all my medical information together, blood type, admission forms, signatures. Everything. I even made a recommendation about what drug they should use to revive me. Shot up, walked into Columbia Presbyterian and passed out with the information stapled to my shirt. They saved me and then got me clean.”

“Wow.”

“I had no money. I knew it would work.” “Then what?”

“Then I stayed sober—still clean, mind you. Eleven years.” “How long were you in the hospital?”

“A month or so. Never looked back. It took me ten years to pay them back for saving my dumbass life.”

“How much?”

“48,611 dollars and twelve cents.” Nick launched into a perfect a cappella version of the song by the Who: “I call that a bargain, the best I’ve ever had.”

“You can sing.”

“Thank you very much,” came the Elvis imitation. Then he turned serious again. “Hey, you know what that song ‘Bargain’ is about?”

“Tell me.”

“Most people think it’s about a drug or a person, but it ain’t.” “Then what?”

“God,” he said. “Pete was talking about God.”

“That actually makes sense. You know, most people wouldn’t have even thought to pay that back.”

“Right intention, right action,” he said matter-of-factly. “The eight-fold path?”

“Buddhism is where it’s at, but I’m just chipping away at the mountain.” “How so?”

I had learned to let Nick find his way. I answered him by opening my palms slightly toward him.

“My fucking mother, as opposed to just some mother-fucker, came to see me last night.”

“I was wondering when we would get around to your mother.” “Yeah, if it’s not one thing it’s your mother, right?”

“Right.”

“So my fucking mother comes last night and I tell her I’m in therapy, and she laughs.”

“She isn’t very empathic, is she?”

“You don’t need therapy, Nick,” he said in a mock woman’s voice. “How did you respond?”

“Stared at her for like two minutes, and she stared back. Then I simply said: I will need therapy for the rest of my life. Then I burned a hole in her eyes with mine.”

“What did she do?”

“She had a fucking shit-fit, and started going off on me,” he said, making gestures with his fingers poking into the air in front of him.

“When are you going to grow up?” he said, poking to emphasize each word with an air jab.

“What did you do?”

“She poked me in the chest and I really had the image of just grabbing and breaking her finger,” he said, biting his lower lip.

“What stopped you?”

“I knew I wouldn’t stop until I broke every bone in her fucking body.”

“Good choice, then.”

“She said some other shit about me not needing it. Then she asked the six-million-fucking-dollar question.”

“Which was?”

“‘Why do you need therapy? You had a good childhood.’ I lost it, man,” he said, raising his voice. “I wanted to slap her silly, but as I was thinking how I would do that, she dropped a bomb.”

“What’d she do?”

“She got all quiet. In a rage, she started screaming at me what a piece of shit I am, what a loser fucking drug addict I am, then she started poking me and trying to kick me.”

“Nick, I’m sorry that happened to you. What did you do?”

“I had a split second where I envisioned breaking her fucking neck with one fucking snap, but decided I would kill her with my words.”

I nodded.

“I said, ‘I’m in therapy because of what you fucking did to me.’” I kept nodding.

“She sank into a ball on the floor and started rocking, scream-crying, and I didn’t do a fucking thing but watch her crinkle on my kitchen floor. I hoped she would die from the awareness. I watched her like you watch road kill flop around after it’s been hit by a car.”

“Then what happened?”

Nick was now burning that hole into my eyes. He deflated again. Right in front of me he folded up, just as he had done in our first session. He wasn’t sucking his thumb, but he could have been.

“This is that spot, huh?”

“Not today, man. I can’t do this today,” he mumbled into his fist. Nick almost seemed to liquefy and leaked off the chair and toward my office door.

“Don’t push yourself, Nick.” “I gotta go.”

“I understand.”

“Next time, man.” He slunk toward the door, head down. “Next time,” was all I said.

* * *

July 27

“When I was six, something happened,” Nick said the moment he sat down.

“Do you want to tell me about it?” “I guess we’ll see, man.”

“You probably can’t tell me everything; it’s almost certainly too much for one session. But what would you be willing to share with me?”

“I was running around, just being a kid. Making noise, freaking out, whatever. I was six, man. So, I was doing whatever the fuck six-year-olds do. I had no idea my mother was a borderline with bipolar disorder. She was intense; I knew that, but I didn’t realize how fucking crazy.

“She ran at me with scissors in her hand, grunting, being a wild woman. Crazy shit. Most of the time she didn’t even pay that much attention to me, so I thought she was playing. When I saw her coming at me I thought it was a game.”

I nodded.

“But it wasn’t no fucking game, man.”

DAN TOMASULO is the author of two previous titles, most recently Confessions of a Former Child: A Therapist’s Memoir(Graywolf Press, 2008), winner of the 2009 Rebecca’s Reads Written Arts Award in Creative Nonfiction. He co-authored Healing Trauma: The Power of Group Treatment for People with Intellectual Disabilities (2005), the American Psychological Association’s first book on psychotherapy for people with intellectual disabilities, and is also the author of Action Methods In Group Psychotherapy: Practical Aspects (Taylor & Francis, 1998). His second memoir, American Snake Pit, was selected as a finalist for The Southampton Review’s 2016 Frank McCourt Memoir Prize and the screenplay has received over 20 awards at international film festivals since June 2017.

]]>http://thenervousbreakdown.com/tnbnonfiction/2018/05/excerpt-of-american-snake-pit-by-don-tomasulo/feed/0Dan Tomasulo: The TNB Self-Interviewhttp://thenervousbreakdown.com/tnbnonfiction/2018/05/dan-tomasulo-the-tnb-self-interview/
http://thenervousbreakdown.com/tnbnonfiction/2018/05/dan-tomasulo-the-tnb-self-interview/#respondThu, 10 May 2018 19:52:14 +0000http://thenervousbreakdown.com/?p=129458American Snake Pit is a powerful title for your memoir-but the subtitle is even more intriguing: Hope, Grit, And Resilience In The Wake Of Willowbrook. Can you tell us where it came from?

The title came from Bobby Kennedy in 1965, after he toured an unannounced visit to Willowbrook, a large institution in Staten Island, New York. He stood shaken in front of the cameras and said: “We have a situation that borders on a snake pit.” That film clip really grabbed my interest and American Snake Pit was born. But in spite of this ominous image of a “snake pit,” this is a book about hope. The tremendous courage, bravery, and hidden skills of the people I helped move into the community by way of this experimental group home is astounding. It’s what’s possible when people are given the right opportunities.

You’ve gotten some very notable writers and mental health professionals to endorse the book, Phil Zimbardo and Adam Grant among them. Reviews of the book have said they laughed and cried throughout. Can you tell us what the book is about and how it evokes this range of emotions?

In 1979, I was hired to manage an experimental group home taking the most disabled and difficult clients out of Willowbrook, which had been identified as the worst asylum in America.

There were multiple abuses going on inside the hospital and when Geraldo Rivera took his camera crew in to film the atrocities, it sparked legal action that demanded the folks in the institution be treated more humanely. Over 100 court decisions later, New York State was required to try to relocate everyone into community-based homes—even the most severely handicapped.

These experimental homes—the first of their kind—were meant to fail. They were only supposed to show that we had tried, and that nothing could be done for these folks. No one believed we could make it work, which ended up being a tremendous incentive for us. The end result was a surprising and interesting mix of humor and pathos. Many of the behaviors of patients were unique and hysterical, while others are deeply saddening and heartbreaking. We had one resident whose sense of smell was so acute that he could detect who owned which pencil just by smelling it. Another resident stripped naked in the middle of town the first time she felt rain because she’d never felt a downpour before; in all her time in an institution she had never been outside while it was raining and misinterpreted it as shower time.

What happens in the book?

Seven intellectually and psychiatrically disabled individuals with profound behavioral problems and amazing hidden talents are moved into a community group home with some not-ready-for primetime-staff, myself included. The town hates us and tries to find ways to keep us from becoming permanent residents. One of those ways is to impose a requirement that we all have to be out of the house in under two minutes during a fire drill. At the time, this seemed impossible, given our lack of staff and the disabilities of the residents.

There are some powerful twists in the story that readers will find fascinating. I can’t reveal the ending, but what I can tell you is that things worked out better than expected. Think of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—but with a happy ending. What is important about these experimental group homes and what happened at Willowbrook is that mental health became a civil right in America. Today, every nursing home, prison, and residential facility must care for the mental welfare of its individuals.

Was it hard to write about these difficult experiences and also try to mix in humor?

Not really. I was a standup comic and comedy writer while I was finishing my PhD and working in the field of intellectual disabilities, so I’ve always had this back-and-forth way of looking at some of the most difficult things in life and trying to transcend them through humor.

You were a standup comic?

Yeah. But please don’t tell my mother—she still doesn’t know. I was on the circuit back when Andy Kaufman was in his heyday and Eddie Murphy was just starting out on Saturday Night Live. In fact, I have some stories about Andy Kaufman that I’ll write about one day. He used to come into the Improv with all the rest of us comics and we’d try some new material out. One night this got out of hand… but that’s a story for another time.

Who are some of your major influences as writers?

Oliver Sacks, Irvin Yalom, and David Sedaris are my heroes, but I’ve also been deeply influenced by the work of Martin Seligman. After getting my PhD I went back to school to get an MFA in creative nonfiction, because I wanted to be a crossover professional like Sacks and Yalom. In fact, I wrote my thesis was on fusing writing styles from both Yalom and Sedaris.

After my first memoir came out, Confessions Of A Former Child The Therapist Memoir (Graywolf, 2008), I went back to school for my Masters in Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) at the University of Pennsylvania. I went through a bit of a dark time and wanted to see what this new subfield in psychology was all about. After I graduated from the program, I realized how important hope was in my life. I wanted to use stories as ways to instill hope in others, so I took on the task of crafting this story as an example. From the feedback I’ve been getting, it seems like this is happening.

You’ve also written the screenplay for American Snake Pit. Can you tell us about that?

I actually wrote the screenplay first. There’s a lot of moving parts in this book and writing a screenplay helps you get the storyline exactly right. There’s no wasted energy in a screenplay. After I wrote it, I went back and finished crafting the book. Once the book was in its nearly final form, I went back and put together a much more detailed and richer script. The screenplay has now been out and about since last June and has one over 30 awards at various international screenwriting and film festivals. The most recent wins are: First Place, Genre Grand Prize for Best Historical Drama at the Las Vegas Screenwriting Contest; Third Place, Best Screenplay Socially Relevant Film Festival in New York; and a finalist for the prestigious Cannes Scriptwriting Contest for Best Historical Drama. At the end of April one of the contests will be doing a complete table read of American Snake Pit. I can’t wait to see that!

You’ve identified this memoir as creative nonfiction because you’ve had to fictionalize parts of it to hide identities and circumstances, and yet there are accurate historical passages in the book about Willowbrook. What was it like to blend fiction and nonfiction?

First, it was necessary to mask the identities and circumstances from which I learned all this material. Parts had to be fictionalized as a way to tell the story without revealing the identities of the individuals. This goes way beyond just changing names. People with such unique disabilities and talents can be identified rather easily, so I had to take great care in mixing and creating various scenes and vignettes to support the understanding of an individual’s circumstance, while also masking any identifying details. In the end, this story is similar, but certainly not identical to my own.

What is your hope for the book and screenplay?

I’m donating the proceeds of the book to YAI National Institute For People With Disabilities and the book has been set up as a fundraiser so that any human service agency that wishes to can get the book from the publisher directly and sell it as a fundraiser without paying royalties to me. My hope is to raise funds and awareness about mental health in the United States and to help people become more tolerant and kinder to each other. In the end we are all here to help one another have better lives.

Anything you would like to ask of your readers?

Does anyone know Ron Howard or Steven Spielberg?

DAN TOMASULO is the author of two previous titles, most recently Confessions of a Former Child: A Therapist’s Memoir (Graywolf Press, 2008), winner of the 2009 Rebecca’s Reads Written Arts Award in Creative Nonfiction. He co-authored Healing Trauma: The Power of Group Treatment for People with Intellectual Disabilities (2005), the American Psychological Association’s first book on psychotherapy for people with intellectual disabilities, and is also the author of Action Methods In Group Psychotherapy: Practical Aspects (Taylor & Francis, 1998). His second memoir, American Snake Pit, was selected as a finalist for The Southampton Review’s 2016 Frank McCourt Memoir Prize and the screenplay has received over 20 awards at international film festivals since June 2017.